Giving it back to him, but sounding like she was asking a simple question. She wasn’t anything like most of the women he was used to talking to. They would’ve said it in a real sarcastic tone of voice.
“I have a hunch,” she said now, “if the patio door was locked you would’ve broken in, one way or another.”
He kept looking at her mouth, done in a light shade of lipstick. She had small white teeth, nice ones. He said, “I was never much into breaking and entering.”
Karen said, “But you’ve always been a criminal, haven’t you?” With the cool look and quiet voice, daring him. That’s what it seemed like.
So he took it to her saying he had pulled a few holdups when he was a kid and didn’t know better, hijacked freight, truckloads of merchandise and hustled it for a living, associated with alleged members of organized crime, but never dealt narcotics; telling her he’d been arrested, held over at Rikers Island, but never convicted of anything and sent to prison. “Okay, I was a loan shark up till recently and now I’m in the movie business,” Chili said. “What’re you doing these days?”
“I’m reading for a part,” Karen said.
She took her coffee cup to the sink, came back to the table and picked up her purse and the script. Chili asked if she could give him a lift down to Sunset— he’d left his car there, back of a store. Karen said come on.
It wasn’t until they were in her BMW convertible, winding down the hill past million-dollar homes, she started to come out of herself and communicate. He asked where she was going. Karen said to Tower Studios. She said she hadn’t worked in seven years, didn’t have to, but the head of production at Tower had offered her a part. Chili asked if it was a horror movie. A mistake. Karen gave him a look saying she hadn’t screamed since leaving ZigZag and was never going to scream again, even in real life. Chili had noticed the title on the cover of the script,
“What’s it about?”
This was what opened her up.
“It’s about a mother-daughter relationship,” Karen said, already with more life in her tone, “but different than the usual way it’s handled. The daughter, Beth, leaves her yuppie husband after a terrific fight and comes home to live with her mom, Peggy.”
“Which one’re you?”
“The mom. I was in high school when I had Beth and now she’s twenty-one. I did get married but the guy, the father, took off right after. So for the next twenty years I devoted my life to raising Beth, working my tail off— but that’s all in the back story, it’s referred to. The picture opens, I’m finally living my own life. I own a successful art gallery, I have a boyfriend, an artist, who’s a few years younger than I am . . . and along comes Beth, wanting to be mothered. Naturally I’m sympathetic, at first, this is my baby . . .”
“She act sick?”
“She has migraines.”
“I can hear her,” Chili said. “ ‘Mom, while you’re up, would you get me my pills off the sink in the kitchen?’ ”
Karen was staring at him. She looked back at the road and had to crank the wheel to swerve around a parked car.
“ ‘And bring me a glass of milk, please, and some cookies?’ ”
“Warm milk,” Karen said, “with a half ounce of Scotch in it. Did you look at the script?”
“Never saw it before. The daughter, she have a whiney voice?”
“It could be played that way. It’s a young Sandy Dennis part. You know who I mean?”
“Sandy Dennis, sure. The daughter blame the mom for her marriage going to hell?”
Karen gave him another look. “She accuses me of talking her into getting married before she was ready. And that, of course, adds to my sense of guilt.”
“What’d you do you feel guilty about?”
“It’s not anything I did. It’s more . . . what right do I have to be happy when my daughter’s miserable?”
“You know the kid’s faking?”
“It’s not that simple. You have to read it, see the way Beth works on me.”
“You got a problem.”
“Well, yeah, that’s what the picture’s about.”
“I mean feeling guilty. I think what you oughta do, either give little Beth a kick in the ass or tell her go see a doctor, get her head examined.”
“You don’t get it,” Karen said. “I’m her
Turning off Doheny, Karen shot through an amber light to swing into the traffic crawling along Sunset.
“People have guilt trips laid on them all the time and they accept it, the guilt. It doesn’t have to make sense, it’s the way people are.”
“Anywhere along here’s fine,” Chili said, thinking of times he had been asked if he was guilty and not once ever having the urge to say he was. Real-life situations, even facing prison time, were never as emotional as movies. Cops got emotional in movies. He had never met an emotional cop in his life. He liked the way Karen sideslipped the BMW through a stream of cars to pull up at the curb. He thanked her, started to get out and said, “What happens, the kid goes after your boyfriend and that’s when you finally stand up to her?”
“You’re close,” Karen said.
What he liked best, thinking about it, was not so much guessing the ending but the look Karen gave him when he did. The eye contact. For a moment there the two of them looking at each other in a different way than before. Like starting over. Karen broke the spell saying she had to run and he got out of her car.
Still looking at the photos on the wall he thought about taking a closer look at the ones Karen was in. Check out her eyes. See what they were like when she was a screamer with blond hair. Maybe later.
Right now Harry was saying, “Here we are.”
Harry, in the doorway, stepping aside, the two limo guys coming into the office past him.
10 
Chili stayed where he was, at the desk. The one he took to be Ronnie Wingate—and had been thinking of as the rich kid—glanced at him, that’s all, then looked around the office saying, “Harry, what year is it, man?” with a lazy rich-kid way of talking. “We enter a time warp? I feel like I’m back in the Hollywood of yesteryear.” He was wearing a suede jacket so thin it was like a second shirt, with jeans and running shoes, sunglasses resting in his rich-kid hair he hadn’t bothered to comb.
The other one, Bo Catlett, was an opposite type, tall next to Ronnie and put together in a tan outfit, suit, shirt and tie all light tan, a shade lighter than his skin. But what was he? From across the room he looked like the kind of guy who came from some island in the Pacific Ocean you never heard of. Ronnie kept moving as he looked at the photos over the sofa, his motor running on some chemical. Now Harry was waving his arm, inviting them to sit in the red chairs facing the desk.
Chili watched Catlett coming first, saw the mustache now and the tuft of hair beneath the lower lip and wondered what was wrong with Harry. The guy wasn’t Latin or even from some unknown island out in the ocean. Up close he was colored. Colored and something else, but still colored.
Sitting down he said, “How you doing?”
That’s what he was and what the other Catlett, the jazz drummer, was too. Chili said to him, “You any relation to Sid Catlett?”
It brought a smile, not much, but enough to make his eyes dreamy. “Big Sid, huh? No, I’m from another tribe. Tell me what brings you here.”
“The movies,” Chili said.
And Catlett said, “Ah, the movies, yeah.”
Ronnie was seated now, one leg hooked over the chair arm, the leg swinging up and down on some kind of energy, his head moving too, as if plugged into a Walkman. Behind them Harry said, “This is my associate, Chili Palmer, who’ll be working with me.”
Harry already forgetting his instructions.
The limo guys nodded and Chili gave them a nod back. “I want to make sure there’s no misunderstanding here,” Harry said. He told them that despite rumors they might have heard, their investment in
