An Accidental Affair (36 page)

Police sirens screamed in the distance. Their wail rushed in my direction.

Holland had wanted three of my cars and five million two hundred and fifty thousand.

The police wouldn’t care about the motivation, only the end result. I was a murderer. My crime first-degree.

Despite all that had happened, those sirens took me back to what had brought me to this moment. Sirens screamed and the only thing that played in my head was seeing Regina Baptiste with Johnny Handsome. If I closed my eyes, that movie would play in my dreams like a cheap movie at a dollar theater that had a bad projector and one screen. The preview would be short and look like the opening moment of
Sunset Boulevard
, not the final moments of
Chinatown
. Bobby Holland face down in a pool while a coked-up, Benadryl-taking, Norwegian beauty entertained herself and fantasized about getting her star on the Walk of Fame.

The parade of police came toward The Apartments. Then the howl continued down Imperial Highway. Shaking, I rubbed my hands for warmth, then removed the car cover from the Maybach. I moved the Bentley to the far side of the complex, parked in visitors, covered the car and all of its injuries, and headed toward the buildings. Not until then did nausea grip me.

Soaking wet, I gagged and regurgitated, threw up with a hostility I’d never experienced, a suffocating brutality, like my body was trying to purge itself of compunction and bad memories.

When I finished, I realized that I wasn’t alone. Near me was a man as dark as an open road. Driver was watching me. He saw me, soaking wet and at my worst, then waited for me to finish embarrassing myself and wipe my mouth with a corner of my damp shirt. I didn’t want him to see me. I didn’t want him involved. But now he’d witnessed this moment and it was too late.

I looked at him and I knew that he knew what I had done. This was easier than any crossword puzzle. Occam’s razor gave the most logical answer and that answer was the best fit.

For whatever reason, I knew that he had been in my position. It felt as if I had been on my feet one thousand and one nights. But all I wanted to do was take off my clothes, drink Jack Daniels from the bottle, and go to bed. Any bed that had a mattress made of rocks and glass would feel kinder than my life felt right now. Exhaustion pulled but anxiety and fear were on the other team in that vicious tug-of-war.

Driver disappeared and came back within five minutes. He brought me a dark towel, jeans, shoes, and a T-shirt.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
When he saw that I was bleeding from my ear, he went back upstairs and came back with peroxide and bandages. By the time he’d returned, I had stripped, dried off and changed. As cars passed by and televisions played above, I emptied my pockets before I wrapped my wet clothing and shoes tight inside the wet towel, then coughed and carried it all to the Dumpster. I came back, saturated my ear with peroxide, and dressed my wound.

I asked Driver, “Anybody come by my penthouse suite while I was gone?”

“Mr. Holder came by again. He looked troubled, but not as mad as before. Said that he’d just left meeting his daughter and would like to talk to you again, if that was okay. Just passing on the message. The pretty British lady came by again. She looked worried this time. The lady who left the manuscript came back a while later, the one who has the dreadlocks. Said to tell you Misty Mouse stopped by and she’d catch you later. She asked me if you had been to Club Mapona. The girl with the pink hair, Holder’s PYT, I was walking the area looking for Bergs brothers and saw her coming back from the store with a ton of empty boxes. Still upset and coming apart at the seams. And somebody left a blank yellow Post-it on your door.”

“Sounds like it’s been pretty busy.”

“Needless to say, the traffic at your door hasn’t impressed Miss Baptiste.”

“I don’t see any paparazzi here, so I take that to be a good thing.”

“No one has seen her. She’s in bed. Since the news came, she’s been in shock.”

I used the stucco wall to keep my balance. “What news?”

Driver paused. “Jesus, Thicke. I guess that you don’t know about the shooting.”

Again I felt the kick of Bobby Holland’s .45 in my hand.

Just as we rushed to the second floor, my cellular rang again.

It was Hazel Tamana Bijou.

This time I answered. Hazel was crying. She was frantic.

Johnny Handsome was born in Granite, Oregon, and worked his way from obscurity to international fame. His prized face was, some said, insured by Lloyd’s of London, the same business that had underwritten the shipping of human cargo when Britain was a chief slave trading power centuries ago. In the business of show, insuring a face, a hand, a nose, legs, buttocks, any type of bodily insurance wasn’t unusual. Lloyd’s of London insured all things narcissistic and unusual, from taste buds of a food critic, to Betty Grable’s legs, Merv Hughes’s moustache, the legs of dancer Michael Flatley, Ken Dodd’s buckteeth, and Abbott and Costello’s
Who’s on First?
routine. Decades ago, Bruce Springsteen had insured his voice for six million. The ten-million-dollar policy that insured Johnny Bergs’s face couldn’t insure his reputation. As far as the public was concerned, it was worse than if Woody Allen beat Sylvester Stallone. Johnny Handsome would never recover from being beaten into the ground by a screenwriter. Johnny Handsome’s team had rushed in and bought all evidence of their A-list moneymaking box-office sensation getting his ass kicked by a screenwriter who was well known inside the business, but unknown beyond the reaches of Hollywood. A beating and an avalanche of publicity had garnered Rihanna sympathy and boosted record sales. An action-hero-romantic-leading-man getting his ass beaten had the opposite effect. For Johnny Handsome, it was castration. There were no groups that protested straight men getting their
ass kicked, even when blindsided. He had gone into his pockets, dug deep and done his best to cover up what had been done. But one of the videos that showed Johnny Handsome getting beaten on Sunset and La Brea had escaped his deep pockets. Bobby Holland had purchased only one video. Only one was needed when blackmail had become your business. It was easy to hear Johnny Handsome beg not to be hit in his face. The audio was modified, the sound of the rain and the traffic and the blaring of horns stripped away, and with clarity you could hear him begging.

“You’re not so fucking tough when you don’t have a gang of Bergs with you.”

“Not my face, James. C’mon, man, don’t hit me in my face again.”

“
You fucked my wife and e-mailed it to me
?”

“You broke my fucking nose. Thicke. I’m going to fucking sue you for this shit.”

“You can’t sue me if you’re dead, Johnny Handsome. You’re not that fucking good.”

“Please, man. Please, stop fucking hitting me. James…please…please…please…”

My rage was immeasurable, as was Johnny Handsome’s fear.

The videographer had added English, Spanish, French, and slang subtitles, the latter as a joke that turned the horrific night into sheer comedy. Johnny Handsome. Begging for his life. The owner of the video was a Hispanic woman, a camerawoman who kept her hi-res video camera at her side as she drove the streets of Los Angeles County. She never knew when she would run across a Rodney King scenario. And this had been her lottery. She had taped the best parts; said that she was already taping the car in front of her, some asshole who had cut her off and she wanted to get the license plate on the car as they sat at the intersection of Sunset and La Brea. So her camera was already rolling on that rainy night as she saw me leave my car and storm toward Johnny Bergs’s prized Porsche, and caught the bulk of
the confrontation. She had captured my rage. She taped me breaking the car window and pulling Johnny Handsome into the streets, Johnny Handsome screaming for help, me pounding his face, then Johnny Handsome running like he was trying to escape a raptor in Jurassic Park.

Bobby Holland had bought that video before that night had ended. Holland knew that was his guarantee that Johnny Handsome would work with him again. And again. And again. Maybe a gag order could’ve been placed on that video, but not before it had gone viral.

Bobby Holland had begged, borrowed, and stolen, and come up with enough cash to satisfy an opportunistic citizen and outbid Johnny Handsome on his own video the way Michael Joseph Jackson had outbid Sir Paul McCartney on the rights to the Beatles’ catalogue. That’s what friends were for. Bobby Holland owned that video. He owned the best video from that night. He owned part of Johnny Handsome’s legacy. He owned part of my legacy as well.

That shame that had come after my humiliation had put me on the run and put Johnny Handsome into a death spiral that crashed him into the pits of his own personal Hell. I’d been too busy dealing with my own pain to have any fucking empathy. I’d been running. And Johnny Handsome had been hiding. Waiting for wounds to heal so he could get his handsome face fixed. What I had done had been devastating, but it took more than my rage to get to his ego.

What had pushed Johnny Handsome over the edge were the jokes from one unknown blue comedienne. A high school dropout who’d had a kid at sixteen then went to comedy open mic on a dare, seemingly overnight had been catapulted to fame for her routine on cable and her “Who wants to sleep with a man who can’t beat Greg Brady’s ass?” That routine had been a sensation on YouTube the next day. Within one day, the comedienne had garnered over one million hits; in four she had sixteen million. More than enough people were following her now to make her an instant star. She had redefined the public
perception of Johnny Bergs the same way comics had changed the perception of Richard Nixon post Watergate, her jokes wicked enough to make Johnny Handsome a strong punch line, powerful enough to make the comedienne almost as popular as Justin Bieber was when he started out—thousands of friend requests on Facebook, tens of thousands following her on Twitter, comedy clubs racing to book her while she was hot and popular enough to draw a crowd to buy the honestly overpriced drinks, and that was enough to get the comedienne invited on both daytime and nighttime talk shows, as well as CNN and BBC.

No matter how many times she said that, the audience roared with laughter.

That stand-up routine was enough to earn that comedienne a coveted spot on Sunset Boulevard at the Comedy Factory. And she had posted a four-minute comical reenactment on
Funny or Die
, that reenactment featuring a look-alike for the one and only Greg Brady beating the shit out of a look-alike for Johnny Handsome. It said a lot about culture. We lived in a culture of crassness, from the reality shows to the routines at the comedy clubs. We lived where people felt as if they had to disrespect others to earn respect. Being mean in a world of intellectual barbarians was more profitable than being polite, especially if people laughed in the end.

Hours ago, after that rising star had finished her thirty-minute set, twenty-five of those minutes spent ridiculing and lambasting Johnny Handsome, she left the stage to a standing ovation bestowed on her
by a room filled with breast implants, liquid face-lifts, facial contouring, wrinkled correction, and tummy tucks. The faithful clients of Botox, JUVÉDERM, Restylane, Perlane, Artefill, and Dysport, poster children for penile implants and vaginal rejuvenation, they all cheered and applauded the rising star, a nobody that Hollywood would now embrace.

Casting directors and reps from most of the studios all wanted to meet the comedienne to talk about rushing to develop a sitcom, about her being featured in a film with top-name A-list clients, about doing a comedy special for cable and branding herself.

Johnny Handsome was waiting for her outside, alone, in the cool breeze and clamor and never-ending line of headlights and brake lights that defined the glamour-filled and pothole-ridden section of Sunset Boulevard. There were a lot of mentally strong people in Hollywood, but there were also a bunch of overly inflated, weak mind-fucks who couldn’t handle the dark side of fame. Most of the egos in Hollywood were so fragile that they made a porcelain teacup seem as thick as The Great Wall of China. We were all scarred; the deepest scars invisible to the naked eye. One crass woman had made the world laugh at Johnny Handsome. One comedienne had made the world laugh at his name like it was funnier than the word
Uranus
. Humiliated, he had stood outside the venue and heard her use his shame as a punch line, heard the audience laugh at him for an eternity.

He had heard them applaud her insults. Applause was acceptance.

The applause did him in. Her acceptance had echoed like his rejection. His humiliation.

In a crowd of hundreds, as people gradually recognized him and whispered his name, Johnny Handsome stormed up and touched her shoulder. When she turned around prepared to shake a hand or greet a new fan or give another autograph, she saw a sweaty man, a superstar in pain, a god who had insomnia and nervousness. She saw a version of Johnny Handsome that the world wasn’t supposed to see. The
comedienne saw Johnny Handsome with his face black and blue, bruised from the emergency plastic surgery that had been done to mend his broken jaw, nose, and other injures, weeks of anger and disdain seated in his deep blue eyes, and for a moment, she couldn’t have known who he was.

He was no longer Johnny Handsome. He was Johnny Grotesque.

He was on pain medications. A little Patrón was in his blood. Blow lined his nostrils. Zoloft was in his bloodstream. And most importantly, a gun was in his hand. She had to have experienced recognition. And a flash of fear. Her mouth probably dropped open and the smile she had turned into pure horror. He shot the comedienne just as she was into the second minute of her fifteen minutes of celebrity and he was living in the last minute of his, stood at point-blank range, pulled the trigger three times and killed her verbal abuse and punch lines and career on the sidewalks of the Sunset Strip, billboards illuminating the dark road to excess and fame. She had killed on stage and Johnny Handsome murdered on the pavement.