Bronx Noir

Hollywood once. The title of this memoir, it’s Hello, He Lied.

Six months ago—before she started up with her my-own-person business—I gave Wendy the loan of this book, figuring it would disgust her enough to keep her home where she belongs, namely in the Bronx with me. I figured wrong.

We had the knock-down-drag-out.

“How can you bust up Katz & Katz?” I asked her, again in my impatient way. “We got a nice long-standing clientele of decent New York criminals.”

“It’s not like it’s fatal,” she said. “Partners split up all the time.” She was cool, like she had the questions and answers doped out ahead of time. Like I taught her.

“Right here in New York, kiddo, you got a big future.”

“As what? Daughter of the great Stanley Katz who doesn’t paint houses? The consigliere? I’m already Stanley Katz’s kid. It’s not a skill. I have to be my own person, find my own space.”

Oy vey.

“In Los Angeles? What’s out there for a lawyer?”

“Entertainment law. Like I told you a hundred times.”

“A hundred times I still don’t get it. What do they know from murder in Hollywood?”

This could have been the stupidest thing I ever said. So I tried to brighten up the moment with a blast from the past.

“Say, kiddo, what’s the best thing about a murder trial?”

Wendy didn’t give me the setup like years ago when she was a little girl all excited about the game of Papa’s punch line.

So I answered me: “One less witness.”

“That is so ancient, Daddy.”

“You’re breaking my heart. Don’t leave me. I’m lonely.”

“It’s a lonely world, Daddy.”

“Which makes it a shame to be lonely all alone. You look like your mother. I miss your mother.”

“Me too, Daddy. But she’s gone. You know.”

Then Wendy and the blue suitcases her mother and I bought her for college walked out of my life.

“California is not out of your life,” she tells me whenever I call these days and start up with the you-walked- out-of-my-life business. Wendy informs me, “They’ve got airplanes now.”

Okay, I should fly out and visit.

But right now, I need to talk.

“You hear me? Your boy found his way to the Palomino Club.”

“Oh—hi, Daddy.”

“This guy, Lewis, he’s for real?”

What am I saying?

“You can bank on Blake Lewis,” says Wendy. “He’s a legitimate television producer. He’s big-time.”

“For me, all he’ll produce is a visit from the feds.”

“Like they’ve never been to your office.” Wendy says this with a sigh, like when she was a teenager complaining how I embarrassed her in front of her friends. Then she laughs and says, “Don’t you want to be on TV, Daddy?”

Is my own kid in on this proposition I got last night?

“Why me?”

“Blake’s looking for consultants. It’s what he does for his kind of shows.”

“What’s he calling this one?”

“Unofficially, it’s called The Assassination Show. Keep it hush-hush, okay? Blake only told me because he had to ask about—well, technical advisors, let’s say.”

I’m thinking over a number of things I don’t want to say to Wendy until I think them over. This seems to make her nervous.

“Well, so, naturally, I sent Blake to you.” Naturally.

“Ideas get stolen in the television business, Daddy. So hush-hush.”

“Television’s for cabbage-heads.”

“Speaking of cabbage, did you talk money?”

“Money I don’t care about.”

“I do. I’m only just getting off the ground here. I did a couple of five-percent series contracts, but you know how that goes.”