Eve's Men (6 page)

He led them around the corner and through a sliding glass door into a huge room with floor-to-ceiling windows running across the entire front wall. At one end of the room, a gaunt, nut-brown man in his fifties sat at a large table dictating to a stenographer, an elderly blonde with the drum-tight, mummified kind of face created by plastic surgeons.

When he broke off, Jolly looked up at his visitors over a pair of rimless glasses. Dark, close-set eyes and a large nose and mouth gave him a sagacious, vulpine look, somewhat undone by what Brian called his slave-boy wig, but which in point of fact looked more like the mop of a cinematic mad scientist. He was wearing sandals, threadbare denim shorts, and a safari shirt hanging half open, exposing his hairy chest.

“Damian, this is Eve Sherman and Charles Poole,” Rick said. “Damian Jolly, Elizabeth English, Brad Huntley.”

Until that moment Charley hadn’t notice the other young man sitting off to the side in a wingback chair, legs curled under him as he stroked a Siamese cat that didn’t purr. Apparently another of Jolly’s angels, the youth looked more like a shaven Mephistopheles, dark and mean, with a masterly sneer.

Jolly nodded but failed to say hello or that he was pleased to meet anyone. He did gesture for Eve and Charley to sit down, however, and they did so, in two of four chairs arrayed in front of the director’s table-desk. Jolly took his time getting out a cigarette and lighting it with a kitchen match, which he then extinguished by waving it languidly back and forth. Through the smoke, he regarded his visitors.

“Let me see if I have this straight,” he said. “You two are Brian Poole’s brother and girlfriend, and you’re here to see if you can get me to drop the charges against him. I’m told you have some sort of offer to make in this regard.”

Charley looked at Eve, expecting her to present their ideas since she was the one who knew Rick and had contacted him. But she indicated for Charley to go ahead.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said. “First, though, I want to tell you that Brian is genuinely sorry for what he’s done. He himself thinks of it now as a kind of prolonged temporary insanity, if there could be such a thing.”

Jolly grinned. “Must be something new, uh?”

“Something going around,” said the one called Brad, and Miss English tittered.

“I realize it’s a contradiction,” Charley went on. “An oxymoron. But it just could be right in this instance. Eve tells me that Brian hasn’t been himself for some time.”

“What is it you do?” Jolly asked.

“I’m a real estate broker in Chicago. The south suburbs actually.”

“Come out here to save your brother’s ass, did you?”

“If I can.”

“Well, family ties are a good thing. I’m a strong believer in family.”

“That’s good to hear.” Charley figured he could be as inane as the next man.

“Poole,” Jolly said. “What is that, English?”

“Or Scottish.”

The director grinned. “So’s Jolly—English, I mean. Only thing is I ain’t got one drop of limey blood. Hundred percent dago, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, now you do. Real name is Giolli, G-I-O-L-L-I. But my old man changed it out of shame because the family was all mobbed up, part of the Gambinos in New York. It’s true, I ain’t shittin’ you. Most of my cousins and uncles are wiseguys, would you believe it? Always wanting to help me out too. ‘Just say the word, Dominic,’ that’s what they call me. Yeah, sure—I say the word and someone gets smoked, I’d probably wind up in the joint right along with my goombah relatives. Good cooks, though. They got cholesterol counts you would not believe.”

In response to this trove of information, Charley forced a smile, wondering whether the director was trying to threaten Brian. “Now that you mention it, you do look Italian,” he said.

Jolly laughed. “No shit! You bet I do. Another dago director—just what Hollywood needed, right?”

“Afraid I don’t know Hollywood.”

“No, of course not. Why should you?” Jolly stubbed out his cigarette. “So let’s get down to it. Just what are you offering?”

“Well, first, as I said, Brian regrets what he did. And he’s prepared to make a public statement to that effect, an apology both to you and the studio.”

“I hope that ain’t all.”

“It isn’t. The main part is, well, Brian still feels that the movie—or at least the script he’s read—doesn’t really tell
his
story, his side of things. So our idea was that when the movie comes out, and if he still feels this way, he could make the rounds of the talk shows and discuss the movie from his perspective.”

Jolly grinned again. “Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. As I understand it, when a movie opens,
any
publicity is good to have. Even controversy.”

“Well, there’s controversy, and then there’s controversy, right? The wrong kind ain’t gonna help anybody.”

“He’d be talking about the movie.”

Jolly looked at Rick. “What do you think? He goes around bad-mouthing the movie—you think it’d hurt us or help us?”

“It’s a hard call,” Rick said. “I don’t know.”

Jolly’s other angel had no such qualms.

“Damian, the man’s a psycho. He could make a public apology one day and shoot you the next. I wouldn’t trust him. He belongs in a cage.”

The director clucked his tongue. “Now, we don’t want to be too harsh, Brad. At the same time, you do have a point.” He turned back to Charley and Eve. “What was it you called it—a case of
prolonged
temporary insanity? Well, who’s to say it won’t continue to be prolonged? What if, when your brother finally sees the movie, he goes berserk again and starts bulldozing theaters or Christ knows what else? What do we do then?”

This time it was Eve who answered, saying that she was with Brian almost constantly and that she would guarantee he would not cause any more trouble. “He’s himself again,” she said. “He really is. He knows he’s made a total ass of himself and that he’ll have to pay a price for it. A price he’ll never want to pay again.”

“That makes sense,” Jolly conceded. “To me anyway, and apparently to you. But then we don’t go around bulldozing other people’s property, do we? No, I think the only answer is to have the man himself in here, so we can judge for ourselves, see with our own eyes whether Mr. Brian Poole can be trusted to behave like a human being.”

Rick apparently had known all along that Brian was to be invited in, for he was already at the door. As he went out on the deck and called down to Brian, Jolly lit another cigarette, with the same ritual as before. Eve lit up too, while Miss English sat stiffly in her chair, doodling along the edge of her steno pad. Angel Brad dumped the cat onto the floor and stood up, fondly regarding his muscular arms and flat gut. Charley absently looked about the room, a living room in normal times, but crowded now with the stuff of commerce: boxes of advertising and posters and leaning bulletin boards full of lists and drawings, one portraying the block of ersatz buildings Brian had leveled. As Charley thought about how much its rebuilding would cost, Rick came back into the room, followed by Brian and the security guard. Charley was relieved to see that Brian appeared cool and relaxed instead of combative.

The security guard moved on around Jolly’s desk to take up a position facing Brian, and Charley was amazed to see the man unbutton the flap on his holster. It was so negligible a detail that Charley almost missed it, yet now he had a hard time taking his eyes off the thing, for it told him more clearly than anything else how Jolly viewed his brother.

“Well, I’m here,” Brian said to the director. “So what’s the deal? Am I to kiss your ass on David Letterman, or what?”

Jolly put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “As a matter of fact, that’s not such a bad idea. But even then, I’d keep wondering what happens next. There I’d be, with my pants down. What do I do if you whip out a chainsaw?”

“I think I can promise you,” Brian said. “No chainsaws.”

“And what about bulldozing?”

“That too. No more bulldozing.”

“And we’d have your word on that?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Ah yes, the word of Brian Poole.” For a time Jolly just sat there looking at Brian as if he were studying an abstract sculpture. Then, smiling crookedly, the director went on. “Your brother here seems to think you’d be amenable to doing the talk shows when the movie comes out—kind of plugging it through criticism, I guess. Tell me, is that your idea or his?”

Brian laughed softly. “Well, I can tell you it sure as hell ain’t mine. I know just what your lousy, lying movie’s gonna say—that Kim was a pathetic, washed-up drug fiend and I was the rotten bastard who made her that way. Am I wrong?”

Jolly smiled thinly. “So that’s how you’d go about plugging the movie, uh?”

“What else? It’s gonna be just another piece of shit like all your other shit, isn’t it? I’d rather piss on it than plug it.”

Jolly’s ruddy face now was almost crimson. He looked at Charley. “This your idea of a joke, Mr. Poole?”

Seeing that Brian was already heading for the door, Charley got up too. “No, not at all,” he said. “I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

He and Eve then followed Brian outside. But Jolly evidently felt that the scene was not over yet. As the three of them went down the stairs, the director and Brad came charging out onto the deck.

“Fuck you, Poole!” Jolly bellowed. “You dumb fuckin’ bulldozer! You tink I do business wid a asshole psycho like you, you got shit for brains!
Fongula tutta familia
, you fuckin’ asshole! You fuckin’ bulldozer! It’s da slammer for you!”

In his rage Jolly seemed to have forgotten how to form the
th
sound. And all the time he was yelling, he kept up a frantic semaphore of Italian obscenity, one moment stabbing down at them the horns of the cuckold—his pinky and index finger rising from his fist—and the next moment smacking the crook of his arm and shaking a cupped hand at them, a gesture whose precise meaning Charley never had known, other than that its sender was in a lousy mood.

As the three of them drove away, Eve gave Brian a despairing look. “Well, you sure cooked his goose, didn’t you?”

Brian made no response. And Charley knew from long experience that this would not be a good time to remonstrate with his brother. So he tried to make light of the incident.

“All I have to say
is fongula tutta familia
, you fucking bulldozer.”

But Brian did not even smile as he sped down the winding gravel road.

Chapter Three

Country and western bars were anathema to Eve. She loathed the music, she loathed the decor, and for the most part, she loathed the patrons too, Okie-Californians who tortured the language and strutted around in their cowboy duds as if they had just come in off the range instead of the late shift at the local Wal-Mart. The Purple Sage was not an exception. A huge, barn-like structure, it had a long, antique wooden bar and brass spittoons and a mechanical bull that stood neglected in an alcove. On the sawdusted dance floor a dozen or so couples moved to the energetic music of a five-piece band whose members looked to Eve suspiciously like acid rockers masquerading as country folk. Whatever their true stripe, they were so implacably loud that she was grateful for the high vaulted ceiling—actually the underside of the roof—which, with the rafters below, broke up or at least absorbed a few decibels of the din.

Still, the only way Brian and his new hick friends could make themselves heard was by shouting at each other across the Formica tabletop of the back booth Eve had insisted on, as far from the band as she could get. Though Brian was not a great fan of cowboy bars either, he had heard that the
Miss Colorado
crew had turned this one into something of a hangout, and he wanted to learn what the status of the movie was, whether the cast had left town, whether the set was being rebuilt, just what was going on. Why he wanted to know these things, Eve didn’t even want to think about. It was too depressing.

Though she saw a number of movie people there—crew members mostly—Brian had no time to watch for them, not with the Einhorn siblings feeding on him so avidly. The more time Eve spent with them, the more they seemed like a loony stage mother and her tongue-tied offspring. Neither of them had changed clothes from that afternoon, nor unfortunately did their personalities show any alteration. Belinda was still unspeakably ebullient and sexy, a frightening cross between Marilyn Monroe and Rosie O’Donnell. Her enthusiasm was such that Eve halfway expected one of her straining breasts to pop a button at any moment, hopefully blinding the brother, who was so tense he looked as if he might snap a bone just sitting there, gripping his mug of beer in both hands, like a strangler.

Belinda didn’t seem able to get over the fact that she was sitting in the same booth with the man who had lived with Kim Sanders—
actually lived with a superstar!
And she kept trying to pump Brian about Kim, for some reason oblivious to the fact that he had just committed a felony to protect the late superstar’s privacy, as well as his own. What was Kim really like? the girl asked. Was she really such a hard case? Did she really do heroin as well as coke? Was her great hit song,
Miss Colorado
, really about herself? Was that who she really was?