An Accidental Affair (37 page)

An eye for an eye. A career for a career.

Her fans ran from her as his had abandoned him. Nothing was funny. No one laughed. No one applauded. Maybe Johnny Handsome knew that you could kill the comic, but you couldn’t kill the joke. Or he knew that Bobby Holland had a video and it was just a matter of time before it surfaced. But he had no idea that at that moment he was free of Bobby Holland. He had no idea that Bobby Holland was taking his last swim and I was on Skirball Center Drive. No one wanted to be a has-been in Hollywood. No one wanted to be a falling star. No one wanted to be a nation’s punch line. The brave drew their videophones as if they were all working for C. B. DeMille, getting that perfect close-up. Police cars pulled up and officers drew their weapons. The Strip was always filled with police officers and bouncers who kept nobodies out of the VIP sections of life. This had happened on the streets. This wasn’t an issue for the bouncers.

Traffic came to a halt and the police shouted for Johnny Bergs to drop his weapon.

He hadn’t been able to sleep. His anger was high.

The anxiety had been unbearable.

Two weeks of insomnia had been excruciating.

He’d killed the comedienne and the agitation and restlessness remained.

He had let his father down. He’d never be able to face Moses Bergstein again.

I’d beat his ass and the Bergs family had become America’s new punch line.

Johnny Handsome gazed at the brilliance and decadence on the snaking Sunset Strip, stared at a sliver of an amoral world that rivaled the debauchery in both Times Square and along the Las Vegas Strip. No one grew up in Tinseltown. This was where many understood life as a child, thought as a child, and would never put away childish things. Girls just wanted to have fun and boys just wanted to get laid in the land of exotic cars and high-end pussy and endless drugs. He stared at his larger-than-life illuminated billboard, smiled a final narcissistic smile that said he had made it from a small town that no one had ever heard of and crawled to the top of the barrel of well-manicured crabs. He had been a priest of the city. Another god who was praised at the box office. Jaws wired shut, face black and blue, Johnny Handsome put the gun to his temple.

Johnny Handsome drove a 1954 Porsche 550 Spyder, just like James Dean.

Maybe, like his idol, Johnny Handsome had always wanted to die young.

The old were forgotten and died long after their careers had ended, but only the young were immortalized. Die young, live forever. Like Dean, he’d never age. He’d never grow old.

As police shouted, horns blew, and his disloyal fans screamed,
Johnny pulled the trigger. His suicide was captured from countless camera angles.

Everything was posted on Wikipedia the moment the bodies hit the pavement.

The crazed fans remained loyal. They didn’t stop videoing and photographing the brain matter or the spilled blood. The rest was on YouTube before the paparazzi had arrived. And of course, once again, as dozens of camera phones recorded it all, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, hi5, Orkut, PerfSpot, Zorpia, Netlog, Habbo, LinkedIn, Ning, Tagged, Flixster, Xanga, Badoo, MiGente, StudiVZ, and Twitter were all ablaze.

Driver’s friend was very nice-looking. She was dressed in a black suit tailored to accentuate her shape. From first glance, she came across as a serious woman with sensuous eyes and full lips, everything accented because her hair was pulled back into a professional bun. When I came in with Driver, she was seated on the sofa, crossword puzzle in her lap. She stood up, her hands behind her back. I reached to shake her hand and introduced myself. She introduced herself as Panther.

Then our conversation ended as unexpectedly as it had begun.

Regina Baptiste came out of the bedroom. She had on one of my T-shirts—
SHHH…I’M HIDING FROM THE STUPID PEOPLE
—a pair of my running shorts and a pair of white socks, all of my clothing swallowing her. Guilt was a helluva drug and it looked like she was overdosing.

She said, “Johnny Bergs killed himself.”

I nodded. “I heard. Driver just told me.”

I went to her and put my arms around her for a moment. She trembled and cried. There were layers upon layers of angst inside her body and it all rolled through me.

She had turned on my laptop. Not the one that I had just bought, but the one from home. She had connected to Slingbox and was looking at the news via the television at our home in Los Feliz. People
were dropping flowers and leaving candles on Bergs’s star on the Walk of Fame.

Then I turned to Driver and his employee. It was an awkward moment. I went to Driver and shook his hand. I told him to go get some rest. Said I’d call him in about twelve hours. He nodded. Then his coworker said good night to my wife and me, and they left us in this apartment.

Less than a minute after they left, Regina’s cellular rang. And so did mine.

For the first time ever, Bobby Holland’s ex-wife was calling on Regina’s phone.

War and death had the power to make enemies become friends.

Hazel Tamana Bijou’s assistant was calling on mine.

I didn’t have to answer to know that Bobby Holland had been found dead at his home.

The man who would play video and cast aspersions on everyone was dead.

As my ear bled, as my hearing returned to normal, the gray car remained on my mind.

After I had left Bobby Holland’s home with a Tumi bag over my shoulder and a computer in my left hand, the gray car followed me. I
needed
them to follow me because whoever was inside that car could place me at Bobby Holland’s home. That would be worth another five million. But I didn’t think they were interested in money or scripts or convincing actresses to be in their films. Fear was in my heart. Fear of the unknown added to the chill that had me coughing. It had to be Johnny Handsome coming to do his own dirty work. They had found me. I didn’t want to be in an area that had cameras. Not while driving the Bentley. A Bentley was the opposite of the gray car. A Bentley was a comet on a starless night.

After I sped down the 101 and merged onto the 405, traffic became as busy as it would be at noon. The gray car remained less than four car lengths behind me. I put my signal on when I came up on Skirball Center Drive, a strip of road that made a loop with Sepulveda Boulevard and Mulholland Drive. They changed lanes two seconds after I did. Bobby Holland’s gun was restless in my lap. I’d made sure that it was loaded before I exited the 405 at Skirball Center Drive. When I made it to a strip that was far away from the 405, I made a U-turn and faced them. They drove closer before they stopped. Baseball bat in hand, I stepped out of my car and stood next to my door. Three doors opened on the gray car and three men stepped out. One had a goatee, and half of Johnny Handsome’s looks. His father. The other two were his sons. The largest had the same equine face with a bulbous hawk-like nose as the one that I’d met before when I’d been attacked at The Apartments. The one next to him was like the Bergs that I had met earlier in the day, another knuckle-dragger; only he looked like a chupacabra with a goatee, his hair slicked back on his head. Then a fourth man got out. From what I could tell, he looked as good as Johnny Handsome. My guess was that two of them had different mothers.

One more was inside the car. In the backseat. He had been riding the middle spot.

The man who looked like the father of the pissed-off Bergs said, “James Thicke.”

“You’re burning a lot of high-priced gas following me all over town.”

He nodded. “You’re soaking wet.”

“Who are you again?”

“You know who we are. We are the fucking Bergs.”

“What can I do for you, fucking Bergs? Need directions somewhere?”

We stared for a moment, the traffic behind them, the coldness of the night on my skin.

“Thicke, you should’ve taken that hostility out on your wife, not my boy. My boy just did what a man is supposed to do when he’s between a whore’s legs. That’s all my boy did. And my boy did it well. If you had a problem with that, if anyone should’ve been beaten, it was her as a lesson of how a lady behaves. That should’ve been your slut of a wife. You beat her ass and mess up her money, not my son’s money. You beat your goddamn wife. You’ve damaged my son’s reputation. You cost him two movies. He’s not happy about that.”

“Why didn’t Johnny show up to deliver this little message?”

“Oh, he can’t be involved. I’ve waited two weeks to give it some air.”

“Are you Bergs coming at me one at a time, or is this like a gang initiation?”

“Oh, we didn’t come to fight.”

“You said that like I should be scared.”

“You’re facing Moses Bergstein. You should be fucking terrified.”

“Four of you. One of me. We could just be nice and start a basketball team.”

Without looking at his boys he said, “Abraham.”

His second equine-faced son opened the trunk of his car. Then Poppa Bergs motioned.

He said, “We can do this quietly or we can do this the hard way.”

“You’re not going to shoot me, Moses Bergstein.”

“Mr. Bergstein to you, you haughty sonofabitch.”

“You’re not going to shoot me.”

He looked at his sons; his boys looked at each other. Then the patriarch of the Bergs fired four times. The headlight to the Bentley was hit. The windshield was hit three times. My heart rate increased, but I didn’t jump. The Bergs came together and stood side by side. The shortest of the clan was around six feet. The tallest was about six-foot-five. All had broad shoulders. They wore snarls and deadly faces while the patriarch held the gun.

Moses Bergstein said, “The next shot won’t miss you. Drop the bat or…”

I dropped the bat and shivered. I was wet and cold and the chill that had settled into my bones refused to set me free. When I kicked the bat away, Moses lowered his gun and looked at his boys. He did that as if to say that this was how a man did things. The easy way. He looked at his boys like they were all fuckups who hadn’t lived up to his standards. He’d made them come after me. While they had that moment, I took a deep breath, and pulled the .45 from behind my back. I started shooting. It wasn’t the time to think. I pulled the trigger over and over.

Moses went down first. He had to. He had the gun.

Then it was too late to turn back. On the range, I was nine out of ten.

Once a man had killed a man, killing more men was nothing. It was all the same punishment. The state couldn’t kill a man twice. And a man couldn’t go to Hell more than once.

I kept pulling the trigger. Once it started, it was impossible to stop.

When I was done, my ears rang, deafness took control, and for a moment, the world was a place of sight, not sound. That scared me more than the shooting. My adrenaline was high and my fear and paranoia and fight or flight had become a monster. I took deep, deep breaths and now made myself think. Being deaf terrified me. Now I couldn’t hear and couldn’t breathe and it felt like I was the one underwater. I cursed and panted and cursed and tried to relax my clenched jawbone. Bobby Holland was somewhere out there floating in the frigid waters of a swimming pool and now four Bergs were on the ground decorated in blood and lead. I jerked and expected a dozen more Bergs to appear out of nowhere. No more Bergs were in sight. Only the one left seated in the car. The one that had been put on punishment like he was a bad child. He didn’t get out and start shooting. Gun aimed, like I had been
trained by LAPD when I took shooting lessons with Regina Baptiste, again for her part in a film where she had to handle firearms, breathing hard, body aching, teeth clenched, I went to the car, clothes sloshing, moved fast through the sole headlight from my Bentley. He was in the backseat, panicked and doing his best to crawl over the seat to get into the front so he could drive away. He’d seen his father go down, then saw his three brothers being gunned down as they tried to run away from speeding bullets. He saw me, saw my gun, then opened his door, stepped out, faced me trembling. He nodded then came toward me, jaw broken, lips tight, anger and tears in his eyes. His old man had tended to his injuries, but hadn’t taken him to the hospital, probably as punishment. He looked down at his dead relatives, his chest rising and falling as tears rolled.

Bizarro Bergs stood straight and looked at me, dared me, his breathing hard and macho.

I snapped, “Why didn’t you leave this between me and Johnny?”

The ringing in my ears had died down enough for me to hear the edges of my own words. Still, they sounded like they had come from far away. I repeated what I had asked and heard better. He tried to say something. But it was gibberish, made no sense. Not at the moment.

I tossed him his Tumi bag and told him to look inside. His gun was there. The .380 that he’d brought to shoot me with was back in the bag. It was clearer to me now. He was to stick the gun in my back and lead me away from The Apartments. He’d seen me, lost control of his emotions and ended up in a fight. He didn’t stick to his father’s much simpler plan to be patient and take me. I’d put his gun back in his bag as I drove from Bobby Holland’s home.

The last Bergs brother exploded in grief and anger and reached in to take his gun out.

He aimed it at me and pulled the trigger to blow my brains out. Nothing happened. It was empty. If he had used guns before, if he was the type of man that his father seemed to be, he probably could have
told by the weight of the gun. He was praying for a bullet to be in the clip. I wasn’t that stupid. He looked at me, incensed and defeated. He dropped the gun and looked back at the dead men. Then he turned back and looked at me. I looked him in his eyes. He dared me. Traffic whizzing by on the 405, moon watching us, I shot him in the head.

I picked up the baseball bat and tossed it back inside the Bentley. Next I wiped down Bobby Holland’s gun and dropped it near my car. Death in the air, I rushed back inside my Bentley and left the dead men where they were. I returned to the 405 and drove north, connected with the 101 and headed toward downtown L.A., imagining ways to get to Johnny Handsome.