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“He’s not crazy about you or your show.”

“And I thought he just didn’t like me.”

“He served in Laos. Lost friends. Thinks the show exploits real pain. He’s very sensitive. Thinks you’re getting rich for a bad reason.”

They bought coffee and pretzels large enough to feed the antenna crowd from
THEM
,
kept walking. Looked out at the postcard-perfect bay, recently found to contain enough industrial contaminants to end life.

“So, they send you to handle the cynical, profiteering producer?”

“Yeah, I’m your crime Sherpa. Let’s just say your boss and my boss are friends …” She shrugged. “Chief of police and Feiffer? They both have places in Newport Beach … go to the same parties. Life down there is a spring break movie with Bentleys.”

Alan nodded. “So. What does it mean?”

“Means my people like to keep your people happy. LAPD has certain officers and detectives who work entertainment crimes. Lichtman, me. Few others. We’re supposed to have a softer touch with creative-slash-artistic types.”

“Like working with the handicapped.”

“That way, when you guys do a movie or a series about cops, you remember us being nice guys and give us a break. You know, write flattering versions of cops. Make us into human beings.”

“P.R.…”

“Everybody goes to the movies. That’s why Lichtman asked off. He couldn’t handle your show. He also thinks it’s giving people ideas …”

“… popular theory.”

Camille licked mustard from those Bardot lips and pulled out black-and-white photographs from a leather valise. Handed Alan the top photo.

“Anyway, I get to keep you all to myself while the other detectives look into the dull stuff.”

Alan was looking at the guy, stamped onto the black-and-white square, who looked like a thinner Uncle Fester. She pointed.

“Barry Canning. They call him ‘OverLoad.’ ”

“Creepy eyes.”

“He’s nice. Reasonable. Periodically, he just can’t handle pressure. Two years ago, he went into a drive-in on a Saturday night, walked from car to car, and blew away twenty-six people because they were honking at the good scenes in
Crocodile Dundee Two.
It just seemed to kind of … piss him off.”

“I’ve always hated it when people talk in movies.”

“He managed a clock store in a mall the rest of the time.”

Alan thought it over. “I say he did it. Clock store tie-in is a dead giveaway. Cover for some weird, pituitary thing. Object displacement. He’s winding his little Timexes, setting his little alarms, but what’s he really thinking? He’s thinking, ‘I hate everybody.’ ”

“Except Crocodile Dundee. He loves Crocodile Dundee.”

“I don’t recognize him.”

“He escaped from a federal prison in east Texas, eight months back. All this could be him. It’s his style. Brutal.”

“Or it could just look good on paper.”

“That’s why I need your help, Alan. You know how this stuff works as well as I do. You write it every day.”

“… seems to be the problem, doesn’t it? That’s what they’re all saying …”

“Not everybody. Most people love your show.”

“They say it’s giving people ideas … just like Lichtman thinks. All these crimes are just copycats.”

“You feel responsible? You can’t. No one can prove a connection.” She smiled. “I’m a cop. Even I can’t.”

He didn’t answer. But Camille saw it in the way he moved his eyes. He was beginning to more than simply wonder. He tried not to fixate on the trauma “The Mercenary” beamed to its astronomical audience, but knew he’d done more than create a monster hit. He’d provided a perfectly detailed, one-hour, weekly seminar on suffering.

“Maybe the critics were right. Maybe I’m not a creative genius like all the network spirogyra swear in their fucking … profit trance.” He looked away.

“So, you’re a what? Evangelist of pain? Come on, Alan, your guilt is boring. It doesn’t work like that. You’re being simplistic. Nice TV shows don’t make people nicer. Funny shows don’t make them funnier. You’re being narcissistic …”

“The whole fucking thing is my idea. I’m not sure anymore. What if there is a connection? What if the higher the ratings, the more my scripts and episodes are in the atmosphere detonating reaction? In some quiet brain, on some quiet street, somewhere.” He looked into her eyes. “If so, on some level, I’m guilty.”

She stared at him. His gaunt, troubled face.

“Look … why don’t we try and find the guy doing this? That’s the most constructive thing we can do. Here … take a look: we’re also wondering about this guy.”

She handed Alan a photo of a guy who looked like a malefic Dick Clark. His skin had a strange, wrinkle-free, stay-pressed look. It shone, looked imported.

“Doctor Adam Steinberg. Plastic surgeon. Re-did his wife. Re-did himself. Earns big bucks, sanding and shaping. Went to prison for tightening a woman’s eyelids a little too far. All she can see is her forehead.”

“Looks like he’s been Turtle-Waxed.”

“Should see Mrs. Steinberg. Did a hundred grand of lasar carpentry on her. I’ve interviewed her. Right out of the Barbie Dream Kitchen. Apparently he’d been her doctor and after her face-lift, he married her.”

“Love by Mattel.”

“So, on the honeymoon, they decide her nose is too big and her ears are a little LBJ.”

He smiled, liking her objective humor with the horrors of humanity; the survival mechanism that sought the ludicrous in the grotesque. It had a reassuring effect on him.

“So, as a wedding gift, he trimmed her head. She got hooked, went the whole way. Higher brows, cheeks shaped, pert mouth, sleek chin, flatter tummy, smooth hips, slimmer thighs, smaller knees …”

“… knees? She had big knees?”

“She said they were so big, people thought she was wearing knee pads.”

“Big knees. That’s weird.” His stomach felt empty but he couldn’t eat any more of the pretzel and tossed it to a pelican that looked like Jay Leno.

“So, she tells me she’s totally restored like a beautiful, old Victorian. But Dr. Adam goes a little ‘enthusiastic’ and starts jig-sawing people who don’t really look so bad to begin with and the AMA is getting a little embarrassed. He gets sued and before you can say ‘my tits are infected,’ he’s in for six years.”

Alan looked at that taut, plasticized face and then up at Camille, who was licking salt off the pretzel’s mulatto elbow. She looked very appealing and he told her so.

“Are you flirting with me? I thought this was professional.”

“Well, I meant as a professional you look appealing.”

“You want to know who else we have?” She liked that he was interested but didn’t comment.

“No. This whole thing is giving me a stomachache. I have to get into the studio; we have a read-through. Why do you think Steinberg did it?”

“He’s good with a knife. Whoever pinned up Linda Crain and blinded Richard Frank knew what they were doing. Cut-work was top-notch. It might’ve been him. Too early to be sure. We’re just starting. And we have almost nothing to go on. No prints on the bodies. Anywhere around them.”

Alan blanked out, feeling guilty, anew.

He could clearly see himself sitting at his word processor, writing the fourth “Mercenary” script, several months back. Describing the sounds and smells of a murder. How superb Barek was with a knife. Trying to imagine the slaughter in extreme close-up. Trying with horrid adjectives and helpless terror to be in that pink
satinized suite, in Vegas, with the honeymooning couple who were Colombian drug dealers as Barek killed them; sought revenge.

They’d killed Barek’s best friend; hung him upside down in a basement, by the ankles, naked, and removed the skin, over a period of hours. Trying to extract information about a competitor’s hidden jungle labs where cocoa paste was moving up the profit chain like diamond toothpaste. They’d skinned him alive because Barek’s friend was a cop who’d been trying to bust the couple. As Alan had written the episode, he’d tried to envison the couple’s Bogotá skin slashed into nightmare fabric by Barek.

Tried to envision their meticulously sliced remains, dead in the heart-shaped tub, steeping in Type-O tea. Alan remembered feeling ill, he’d captured it so perfectly. It had made his shirt soak with sweat. But there had been a sense of justice in what Barek had to do. No matter how brutal the character became, he was always just. Alan always insisted Barek’s violence be almost biblically fair. It redeemed everything. Created a moral updraft.

Some said it merely excused sadism.

But for Alan, at the moment of writing the scene, he remembered finding it hard to distinguish the scene as false or true experience. It had felt that real to him; he’d made it real in his mind. It may as well have existed. Existence and experience, more often than not, for him, were merging.

“Who else you have?” He leaned on the pier railing; weak.

“Few repeat felons. But none of them really have the
chops for this level of …” She could see him waiting for her description; knew the wrong words would plunge him into deeper guilt. “I just think we should keep looking.”

Alan looked up from a mob of gulls, debating atop sleepy currents. She stood, leaned against the pier railing, with him, swallowed the last of her coffee. Alan couldn’t decode what her silence expressed. The wind blew her hair, momentarily veiling her features with its delicate storm.

Fog began to mourn at the horizon and Alan decided to say nothing more. He was starting to like Camille in a way he’d never felt about Erica. Liking her too much to start slyly excavating. To start making familiar, teasing allusions designed to draw her out. She would come out with her hands up when she was ready. It was enough she’d come here today to talk.

He knew she could’ve insisted it be done in some official place that had deafening phones, bad coffee burning; cardiac faces crashing into bad news. He knew she could’ve done it the “formal” way. But she didn’t.

She’d suggested Malibu, saying she was returning from an investigation on the navy base at Port Hueneme, midway to Santa Barbara. Malibu was on her way.

“Besides, I wanted to see you,” she said when she called at eight-twenty this morning and suggested they meet at the pier for a talk. She’d said it was official.

She also said she’d been thinking about him.

She’d read the novel portion he’d sent her and found its layers and concerns different from his usual conversation; the edgy banter and testing humor. The entertaining
avoidances; amusing contortions of thought that moated off real feelings; revealing truths. Passions forbidden by charming armament.

But he knew his personality had always buried the fuse; hidden the explosion. It was his gift. It was his curse. And though this strangely charming woman, who was a detective and looked at dead bodies and could shoot people, was nothing like anyone he’d ever dated, he wanted her to come closer.

He wanted to peel back his skin and let her see bones and emotions; fears that moved through him like vicious gangs. But he didn’t know how to open up to her. To admit the expanding sense of terror without sounding like a rambling fucking idiot. A Hollywood flake with big success and repugnant immaturity, interchangeable with fifty other self-contaminated “names.”

He’d given her the novel portion as an emotional offering; a kind of child’s drawing of what it felt like to be him. Like the finger semaphore cards mutes hand out in public places to connect with those who can speak. He wanted to be understood for more than his furious show and his guilt. He didn’t just want her there because people had died. He didn’t want tragedy to be the connection.

He wanted a loving, tender mother, again. A mother he never got for long. One who would hold him and tell him everything would be all right. Tell him with soothing tones and warm touches. Protect him in harboring arms. Sing softly until he slept.

Camille kept staring and watching. Smiling at strange times, her interest in him, beyond the ghastly
investigation, evident. Deeper thoughts impossible to gauge.

“You’re sure you don’t have the flu?”

When he got into his Aston Martin and tilted down the mirror, he noticed it, too. Something was wrong with him. And it was getting worse.

A
lan needed to see a doctor who’d keep everything confidential. The press would jump all over his life if they knew something was wrong with him, and he wanted a pro. Someone who didn’t sell tips to tabloids.

He called Jordan, got shot through the Agenda Temple and Jordan’s assistant, Traci, told Alan about the guy they all used: a former Harvard Medical School professor who’d moved to LA. because of allergies.

Alan met Dr. Stuart Wessler at eleven sharp at UCLA Medical and as the doctor ran warm, inquisitive fingers over Alan’s shoulders and torso, he wanted to talk “Mercenary.”

“… it’s daring, Alan. Iconoclastic.”

The big word sounded like ectoplasm, stretching its way out of Dr. Stu, who had a Hippocratic-gigolo look; like
one of those daytime soap-opera erection-types and a Corvette, gene-spliced into an upbeat dildo.

“Taking chances. That’s where it’s at.” Dr. Stu was now at the sink, lathering furry fingers with decanter soap, looking over his shoulder; a smocked pinup. “Especially for creative people.”

“Yeah,” said Alan, too tired to think; doing a shoddy retread on the same thought, “… risks.” He yawned. A decent night’s sleep would feel like a heart transplant.

“So, let’s see what’s going on in there …”

Dr. Stu pulled chrome devices from his drawer and was now leaning in close, staring into Alan’s nose; Carl Sagan exploring Martian tunnels.

“Tell you, I sure love show business people though,” he said, in response to nothing. “I grew up around it. My father managed a movie theater in Panorama City. I get all kinds of interesting cases in here.”

He wanted to drop names. It was all over his barely mowed monkey face. Alan revved a wan, half-curious smile. Let it slowly idle.

“Yeah … I consulted on a flu case for one of the Bee Gees. I forget which one.”

Alan tried to contribute, though Dr. Stu had the skinny searchlight up his left nostril, hunting for bad guys.