20 ~ McCarvey
With only two days to create the world between the time Nite Line came out and the wake for Max, Ferris Hanks had swung into a frenzy of activity. When I checked my answering machine from the comfort of Eleanor’s living room, I found no fewer than six messages, each pitched at a higher level of urgency. At the conclusion of the sixth, Henry took the phone away from him, leaving him piping orders in the distance.
“Call the man,” Henry said. “Else, I’m going to have to give him a cigar to calm him down.” The next message was from Spurrier, demanding to know if I had anything to do with the ad in the paper. He left a home number, sounding significantly irritated. I called Joel Farfman instead.
“More than a hundred calls,” he said. “And that’s not counting the ones from Hanks. In, what? Four hours? You’re going to have some party.”
“You going to be there?”
“Wouldn’t miss it. I’m coming as the Lone Ranger.”
“Think you’ll be the only one?”
“I’ll be the only one with a faithful Indian companion. Wait until you see Tonto. But keep your distance.”
Everybody seemed to assume I was gay. “How hard would it be for you to dig out everything you’ve run on the guy who killed Max?”
A brief silence. “Not hard. That’s what interns are for.”
“Can you meet me at the Paragon Ballroom in a couple of hours with some photocopies?”
“What for?”
“I just need to get my bearings.”
“Will you give me an interview?”
“This is a trade?”
“Call it that.”
“Okay. But you can’t use my name.”
“Screw that to the wall and hang a picture on it,” he said pleasantly. “Remember who, what, where, when? You’re ‘who.’ ”
Nite Line, after all, was a weekly. With any luck, this would all be over by the time the next edition came out. And if it wasn’t, I’d probably be safe in jail. “Okay. But the Times is on this, too.”
He laughed, a pinched, wheezy sound like a squeeze bottle being emptied. “The Times,” he said. “I can imagine their angle. ‘The Gay Ripper’ or something like that.”
“I don’t think he’s gay.”
“When did that ever stop them? By the way, Max is in the new People. There’s no press agent like death.”
“You could do me another favor,” I said.
“Yeah?” The tone was noncommittal; like Ferris Hanks, Farfman saw favors as a form of currency.
“I want to know who placed a personal.”
“No can do,” he said promptly. “Everything they want you to know is in their ad.”
“This has to do with Max.”
“Oh.” He barked something to someone else, covering the mouthpiece, and came back. “I don’t think I want to hear this.”
“Sorry. It looks like Max met his killer through your paper.”
I heard a small squealing sound: Farfman sucking breath between his teeth. “You’re sure?”
“As sure as I am of anything at this point.”
“Ah, shit,” he said. “I really hate…” He blew into the mouthpiece of the phone. “Balls,” he said. “Read it to me.”
I unfolded the torn page, which was beginning to fall apart along the fold lines, and read it to him. “Who placed it, when it was placed, how he paid. Anything else you can think of.”
“Yeah, yeah.” There was something new in his voice, an edge that hadn’t been there before. “You got it. See you at the Paragon.”
After all that unaccustomed sleep the second cup of coffee gave me a mild case of the jitters, so I poured the last chill inch or so into the sink and cleaned up. I actually dried the counter. The new Simeon, preparing for domesticity. Then I went out blinking into the flawless sunshine of Venice and drove home.
I avoided the driveway and came up to the house from the side, hiking through tangles of chaparral and surprising a toad the size of one of Ferris’s Yorkies as I hoisted myself up onto the deck. The place was just as I’d left it. No Ed Pfester, or Phillip Crenshaw, or whatever his name was, waiting in the living room and slicing up my carpets for practice. No new messages on the machine. No word from Schultz. A wind had kicked up, and the house was creaking like someone was practicing dance steps on the roof. I set the new world record for changing my trousers and took Topanga into the hot Valley to avoid the beach traffic, heading for West Hollywood.
I’d hit the Monday lull, lunchtime over and all the folks who keep civilization plodding along back in their offices until six, and the traffic on the freeway slipped between the lane lines like it had been greased. I turned on the radio and got the midday disk jockeys. There must be something about sitting alone in a little room with a microphone for hours that is fatal to the soul. The only things that sounded live were the commercials, which were recorded, and the music, some of which was made by people who were dead.
The Paragon Ballroom was a building I’d passed dozens of times without ever noticing it, a two-story red brick barn, liberally enlivened by graffiti, that occupied half a city block on a treesy side street just south of Santa Monica Boulevard. The doorway was arched, double wide, and open, the windows above it blocked with dirty plywood. The hand-painted sign hanging crooked to the left of the door advised all and sundry that Hollywood’s most glamorous venue was available for very special events or, on a more mundane level, as a rehearsal hall. Four cars were scattered, isolated and looking lonely, around the big parking lot.
Inside, the Paragon was one enormous room with a gleaming hardwood floor that must have been sixty years old, blistered and peeling floral wallpaper, and three sets of metal stairs leading to a catwalk that ran along the upper half of the building: a vantage point for the tangle-footed who wanted to watch the dancers. A bandstand, bare plywood set on metal risers, stood against the far wall. The place smelled as though the doors hadn’t been opened in years, a clogged, generic odor of disuse, like damp newsprint or pressed flowers. Three carpenters wearing T-shirts, cutoffs, and bandannas, as though they’d been costumed by the contractor, purposefully banged hammers against the plywood of the stage, and a man with an apron full of tools stood on a rickety, wheeled metal tower in the center of the floor, hanging lights from the beams below the ceiling. The most glamorous venue in Hollywood it wasn’t.
“The man hisself.” It was Henry, dressed to spar with Sylvester Stallone in gold boxing trunks and a sky-blue sleeveless formfit T-shirt that made him look even blacker. He had a pen tucked into the hair above his ear. “Ferris been pulling his hair out with both hands.”
“Anxiety’s good for him. It raises the pulse rate.”
“He thinks the fountain might oughta go over there,” Henry said, pointing to the corner of the room directly right of the stage.
Ferris’s holy water. “Up to him.”
“And close off the gallery up there. Keep everybody down on the floor. Put a couple of our helpers on the catwalk to keep an eye on folks.”
“How many helpers have we got?”
“Many as you want.”
“Two should do it up there. No need to be conspicuous. Where is he?”
“I sent him home. He was driving everybody crazy. We moved the stage three times already.”
“So walk me through it.”
He wrapped a big hand around my arm, making me feel like a toddler, and towed me to the door. “People come in here, which I’m sure is no surprise. Two guys here, handing out tickets for the drawing and identifying everybody they can. Valet parking outside-Ferris wants to control the cars. Hell, Ferris wants to control everything. He was all upset this morning that daylight savings was over, wondering who he could call about it. He’s trying to get the street turned one-way for the evening. Okay, they come into the room and head for the bar-”
