A Savage Place Read online

  “What did the guy look like?” I said.

  “Fat guy, bald, had a little beard—you know, a Vandyke—but strong-looking, you know? Hard fat.”

  I looked at Candy.

  “Sound familiar?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Rafferty looked back and forth between us. “What did I miss?” he said.

  “You were out in the kitchen looking at the sink,” I said. “It sounds like the guy that poured it on Candy last night.”

  “Him?” Rafferty’s eyes widened and his mouth thinned. “That fat fuck?” He opened his mouth to say something else, realized he had nothing to say, breathed in instead, and shut his mouth.

  “We’ll file that information,” I said. “Who’s Sam Felton?”

  “Producer. Studio is Summit.”

  “And you saw him talking to a fat man?”

  “Yeah and the fat guy said, ‘Here I am.’ And Felton says, ‘Here’s your money. Same as last week?’ And the fat guy says, ‘Absolutely.’ He says, ‘I don’t jack up the price. I don’t do business that way. You make a deal, you stick with it.’ And Felton hands him an envelope, and the fat guy takes it and folds it over and puts it in his hip pocket without looking. And Felton says nothing else. Just stands there. So the fat guy says, ‘See you next week. Same time, same station,’ and gives him a kind of little salute. You know, like this.” Rafferty touched his forehead and flipped his hand away. “Like, ‘ta-ta,’ you know?”

  “Yeah. Did you see what he drove away in?”

  “No.”

  “Why do you think it’s a payoff?”

  “What else could it be?”

  “Did you say anything to Felton?”

  “No.”

  “So for all you know, Felton could be paying off his bookie.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Rafferty said. “I don’t know how to explain it, but it was a payoff. There was a threat there. The way the fat guy stood and talked. The way Felton was. There was something going on.”

  “And you’d heard rumors about payoffs already.”

  “Yeah, sure. I mean, Candy had mentioned she was looking into it.”

  “So you were keeping an eye out.”

  “Sure. But I didn’t read anything into it. I’m telling you, this is straight. Besides, look what happened to Candy. Doesn’t that prove it?”

  “It adds credence,” I said.

  “I went to see Felton,” Candy said. “He denied the entire incident. I talked to other people on the set. They didn’t know anything, but I had a sense Felton was covering up something. As if he were scared or guilty.”

  “Just a feeling, like Rafferty’s?”

  “Yes. But I’m a reporter; it’s a trained feeling. I think they used to call it a hunch in the old Bogart movies.”

  “And?”

  “And I had an appointment scheduled with the head of Summit Studios, Roger Hammond. It was scheduled for today.” She paused. “I missed it,” she said.

  “Did you tell Felton that Rafferty saw him?”

  “No. I just said I had an eyewitness.”

  “Anybody know that Rafferty is it?”

  Candy was quiet for a moment. “Just the police and the news director at the station.”

  “You tell anybody, Mick?”

  He shrugged. “Well I asked around a little. People on the crew. Some of the cast, like that.”

  “So a lot of people know you saw the payoff.”

  “Well, yeah. So what? I can handle what comes along.”

  “Be prepared to,” I said. “I can look out for her, but you’re on your own.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Rafferty said.

  “Listen,” I said. “I can take you, and there’s guys can take me. Don’t be such a goddamn rooster all the time. Someone wants to kill you, it’s not hard.”

  “Just ’cause I’d lose doesn’t mean I won’t fight you,” Rafferty said. “I don’t have to listen to a lot of cheap shit from you, win or lose.”

  I nodded. “That’s true. I’ll give it a rest. But you’ve got to know what you’re dealing with. These aren’t tough guys who are trying to prove their manliness, or guys who are interested in who can take who. These are people who will shoot you in the back while you walk up to your door, or guys who will run you over when you’re crossing Melrose Avenue on your way to Lucy’s El Adobe. They don’t care if it hurts. They don’t care if it’s fair. They care about you being dead and silent. These are people you’re supposed to be scared of.”

  “You be scared of them,” Rafferty said. “I got no time for any more goddamn lectures.” He looked at Candy Sloan. “I’ll be around. You need me, I’ll be there.” He left the room, walked down the short hall, opened the door, went out, and shut it behind him. Firmly.

  Candy and I were quiet. The living room seemed to take on the blue clarity of the pool outside.

  Candy said, “He’s been small all his life.”

  “I know,” I said.

  The walls of the house were thick and stuccoed. No sound came through them. There was only the faint purr of central air conditioning somewhere inside. A single leaf drifted onto the surface of the pool and turned slowly.

  “What now?” Candy said.

  “Now you rest and I watch you. When you’re better, we’ll keep that appointment you broke today.”

  “You and I?”

  “You and I.”

  Chapter 5

  Candy was a quick healer. I sat with her for two days while the swelling subsided and the cuts began to heal. I cooked soup for her and whatever I could find in her kitchen for me. The first night I made pasta with fresh vegetables in a thin cream sauce. After that it was downhill. Candy didn’t have a rich larder, and by the end of the second day I was reduced to crackers and peanut butter with a side of instant coffee. Nights I slept on the couch; days I read whatever she had handy: Rachel Wallace’s new book, Vogue, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Redbook, a collection of essays by Joan Didion. I wished I’d brought my copy of Play of Double Senses with me. It would have impressed the hell out of Candy. I could let drop that it was by the president of Yale, and she’d think I was learned. However, the book was in my suitcase at the Beverly Hillcrest along with my clean shirt and my toothbrush. Candy had a razor, so I was clean-shaven, but my breath was beginning to tarnish my teeth.

  Late morning of the third day, I was doing sit-ups with my back on the floor and my feet on the couch when Candy came out of her bedroom dressed, with her hair combed and a good job of makeup that covered a lot of the damage. I was looking at her upside down. She looked very good.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For Roger Hammond, for getting you a real meal, for going out and getting back to work. Not necessarily in that order.”

  “No,” I said. “Definitely not in that order. First the decent meal.”

  She smiled, sort of. “Okay,” she said. “It’s late enough to make it brunch, maybe. Do you always sleep that way?”

  “Sit-ups,” I said. “Isolates the stomach and saves the back.”

  “I thought you were supposed to keep your legs straight.”

  “You were wrong.”

  She smiled again, sort of, favoring the side where the stitches still pulled. I got up.

  “How many do you do?”

  “A hundred.” I put the gun and holster back on my belt, got my blazer off the back of a chair, and slipped into it. My yellow shirt was in trouble, and my pants were baggy. “How about we go to my hotel while I get a change of clothes and a brush of tooth and then off to some elegant Hollywood bistro for an early lunch.”

  She nodded. “I’ll call a cab. I left my car in Griffith Park.”

  The cab took us to the Hillcrest, where I showered and shaved and brushed my teeth and put on clean clothes and left the others to be cleaned. I had switched to a light gray blazer, charcoal slacks, white shirt, black and red paisley pocket handkerchief.

&nbs
p; “Tie?” I said to Candy Sloan.

  She looked as scornful as she could without pulling her stitches.

  “I’ll try to find a place that requires one before you leave, so you won’t have brought one out here in vain.”

  “I brought several,” I said. “Keeps me in touch with my roots. Where shall we eat?”

  “I can’t eat much. Is there any place you’ve heard of you’d like to try?”

  “Actually I’d like to go back up to the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset.”

  “Near my apartment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “After I saw you make that pasta the other night, I thought you were a fancy eater.”

  “I am. And a plain one. And a big one. I like Hamburger Hamlets.”

  “All right, but you must let me take you to Scandia when I can eat too.”

  “I been to Scandia. But I’ll go again.”

  At Hamburger Hamlet I had a frappéed margarita and a large hamburger and a big beer. Candy managed a dish of something called Custard Lulu. Then we took a cab out to Griffith Park and found Candy’s car where she had parked it, near the zoo entrance. It was a brown MGB with a chrome luggage rack. She put the top down, and we drove back to Hollywood on the Golden State Freeway then along Los Feliz to Western and then onto Hollywood Boulevard. The sun was bright. The smog was in remission. I was struck, as I always was, with the shabbiness of Hollywood Boulevard. It was a small-town shabbiness: low stucco with paint peeling, burrito stands with plastic Mexicans and plastic cactuses and plastic burros. There were places that sold Hollywood memorabilia and places that sold papaya juice; there were office buildings about the size of those in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, there were gas stations and record stores, and pink-and-yellow motels, and a steady mingle of street kids and tourists.

  “Gee,” I said, “if things really started booming out here, this could become another Forty-second Street.”

  “Oh, come on,” Candy said. “It’s not that bad.”

  We stopped at a light at Cahuenga Boulevard. A young black man with a haircut like Dorothy Hamill’s crossed in front of us. He wore lipstick and mascara. He wore tight pink pants and spike heels, and his fingernails were long and painted silver. With him was a thin blond boy with a tank top and short shorts and translucent shoes with four-inch spikes. He, too, was wearing makeup and jewelry. He carried a small beaded clutch purse. The black kid blew me a kiss. The blond boy yanked at his hand and whispered something, and they hurried across the street.

  The light changed, Candy slipped into gear, and we moved on. Behind the thin gray line of buildings and sidewalks the Hollywood Hills rose to the north, green with trees, dotted with color, and beyond them, looking sere, the San Gabriel Mountains. The old Pacific wilderness, barely at bay. We turned left onto Fairfax and headed south past CBS and the Farmers Market, across Wilshire, with the May Company on the corner. Had Mary Livingstone really worked there?

  We crossed Olympic and turned right onto Pico. Along Pico there were a lot of kosher markets. Then we slipped up over a hill and down past a Big Boy burger stand and turned into the gate at Summit Studios. Candy showed her press card to the guard at the gate and asked for Roger Hammond. The guard went into his shack to call and came out in a minute and waved us through. To the right of the gate as we drove in was a Victorian street full of false fronts and, beyond that, the superstructure of an old elevated train. Candy turned left past a sound stage and parked in a slot marked VISITORS in front of a two-story building with a balcony across the front.

  Summit Studios looked sort of like one of those permanent fairgrounds with a large number of small nondescript buildings scattered about inside a fence. None of the buildings were very new and most of them needed a paint touch-up.

  We went up the stairs at one end of the balcony and walked halfway down the length of the building to a door with a plaque that said ROGER HAMMOND in simulated-oak Formica. We went in. A rather elderly secretary told us to sit on the couch, Mr. Hammond was on the phone long-distance.

  I looked at Candy. “Long-distance,” I said soundlessly. She nodded and smiled. “I’ve never met anyone, when I came to interview them, who was on the phone making a local call,” she said softly.

  The secretary went back to work. Some phones rang. She answered them. After about ten minutes Roger Hammond appeared at the office door to the left of the secretary and said, “Candy Sloan. I love you on the news.”

  We stood up.

  “Come on inside,” Hammond said. “I’m sorry as hell to make you wait. But I was talking long-distance.”

  I smiled. Candy introduced us. Hammond shook my hand firmly and about half a second longer than he should have. He was a slim, sandy-haired, Irish-looking guy, with a fine lacework of broken veins on his cheeks that looked like a healthy color if you weren’t observant. He had a widow’s peak with the hair receding substantially on either side of the peak, and the hair was cut short without sideburns. He was dressed Designer Western with boots, dark blue jeans, and a plaid shirt, half unbuttoned. His belt was a wide one of hand-tooled leather with silver mountings. It matched his boots.

  “You in TV, Spenser?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Oh?”

  “Spenser’s helping me on a special assignment, Mr. Hammond. We’re looking into the charges of labor racketeering in the film industry.”

  “I’d heard you were doing a series on that, Candy. Or at least that it was on the boards. Have you got anything yet?”

  “I got beaten up several days ago.”

  “My God, you didn’t. Hell, you did, didn’t you. I can see the marks, now that you mention it and I’m really looking. God, Candy, that’s terrible.”

  “I’ll recover.”

  “And Spenser,” Hammond said. “That’s where you come in, isn’t it? You are her bodyguard.”

  I shrugged.

  “Sure you are. You’ve got the build for it. You look like a guy can handle himself. You stay close to this big guy, Candy.”

  Candy smiled and nodded. “What can you tell me about labor racketeering in the industry, Mr. Hammond?”

  “Roger,” he said. “Call me Roger.”

  Candy smiled again and nodded. “What can you tell me?”

  Hammond shrugged widely, bringing his hands, palms up, to shoulder level, elbows in. “I wish I could, Candy, but I can’t. I don’t know a damn thing. I’ve never encountered any. I’ve heard rumors, you know, in the industry, but nothing firsthand.”

  “I’ve got an eyewitness that said a producer on one of your movies handed an envelope of cash to a thug on the set.”

  Roger looked at Candy Sloan for a moment. Then he pressed his hands together beneath his chin and touched the underside of his chin with his fingertips. He rocked back in his high-backed executive swivel-chair and gazed at the ceiling. Then he let the chair come forward until his elbows rested on the desk. He dropped his eyes level again at Candy, and with his fingertips still touching his chin, he said, “Candy, that’s bullshit.”

  Then he pointed the still-pressed fingertips at her for emphasis.

  Candy shook her head. “No, Roger. It’s not bullshit. I have the eyewitness. The producer was Sam Felton. The movie was Savage Cycles. Are you telling me you know nothing of this?”

  Roger was shaking his head. “Candy, Candy, Candy,” he said. “This is bad.” He was shaking his head and moving his hands in time with the shake. “This is no good, Candy. This is lousy yellow journalism. Are your ratings that bad?”

  “Roger, I’ve got the eyewitness. Now, I certainly wanted to give you a chance to comment before we go on the air with this.”

  “Candy, you haven’t got anything,” Roger said. “You got a new director who’s third in the market and he’s scared for his job, that’s what you got. Nobody in my organization is paying anybody anything. That’s my statement. You have an eyewitness, bring him out. Who is it?”

  Candy shook her head.

  Roger nodded. “Yeah.
I thought that’s the way it would be, Candy. You have an eyewitness, but he has no name. You and Joe McCarthy.” He unpressed his hands and made a repelling gesture, as if to brush away a swarm of gnats.

  Candy smiled brightly at him and was silent. He was silent. I was silent. Roger stared at Candy and then glanced at me and then stared at Candy some more. He pressed the hands back together again and rested his chin on them, the fingertips against his mouth. Candy’s legs were crossed and her knees were very handsome. So was the line of her thigh beneath the white skirt. Sexism.

  “If you have a witness, Candy,” Roger said, “I’d like to confront him, or her. If you have real evidence of wrongdoing in my organization, you owe it to me to level with me.”

  “I think there’s danger to the witness,” Candy said.

  Roger was aghast. He pointed both thumbs at his own chest. “From me? Danger from me? Who the hell do you think I am?”

  “So you deny any knowledge of labor racketeering, payoffs, kickbacks, whatever, in Summit Studios,” Candy said.

  “Absolutely,” Roger said. “Categorically. And let me say this, Candy. I resent very much the implication that I might be guilty of complicity. There are libel laws, and I’m going to be talking with our legal people.”

  “Sam Felton had to get the money from somewhere,” Candy said. “I assume he wasn’t paying out of pocket. Could you put me in touch with your financial officer, Roger? Treasurer, comptroller, whatever you call him here.”

  “For God’s sake, I will not. Candy, this has gone far enough. I’ve tried to cooperate, but you are not willing to be reasonable. You come in here and make wild charges and ask for the name of our treasurer.” He looked at me, leaning forward a little. “Spender, what the hell am I going to do with her?”

  “It’s not just that you got my name screwed up,” I said, “it’s how you enlisted me in your cause. What are we sensible guys going to do with this silly broad. That’s where you lost me.”

  “Geez, I’m bad with names,” Hammond said. “I must have misunderstood, what is your name again?”