Bech at Bay (17 page)

The team was less impressed by the plaintiff’s accumulating case than Bech was. Rantoul even rose to indignation about Ohrbach’s chiropractor, an autocratically bald man who from the witness stand claimed to have observed a marked psychosomatic deterioriation in his patient immediately after the
Flying Fur
article had appeared. Solemnly turning over leaves from his files, in a cumbersome ring binder, the chiropractor described lower-back spasms and attendant pain that incapacitated the sensitive agent for months thereafter and perhaps permanently impaired his professional effectiveness. Rantoul had asked to examine the pages that the chiropractor consulted and saw terms like “mental-stress-induced” and “spastic depression” inserted in a smaller handwriting, in a fresher ink, into the records of two long years ago, when “The Only Winners Left in Tinseltown” had appeared. At lunch, Rantoul boasted, “Ah asked the judge to admit the file in evidence and Kepper turned pale as a goose’s belly. He withdrew the testimony. We would have had ’em for perjury sure as sugar.”

The last word was a modification, in Southern-courtly fashion, for Rita’s benefit. As his stay in Los Angeles moved into its third week, Rita had become clearer to Bech. Her Hispanic rat-tat-tat way of thinking and talking had been softened by North American entrepreneurism, its willingness
to smile and to explore possibilities. One day when Rantoul and Nunn had some other legal fish to fry, he and she had gone out to lunch at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks away from the courthouse. To her he had unburdened himself of his qualms, his growing sympathy and pity for the plaintiff, who seemed to be the defendant. “I feel so
guilty
,” he said.

“That is a luxury you are allowing yourself,” Rita explained. “Some kind of Jewish thing, identifying with the people trying to destroy you. A way of making yourself superior to a fight. That’s fine, Henry. That’s very lovable. That’s why you have us, to do the fighting for you.”

“Ohrbach’s Jewish, too. Maybe he feels the same way about me.”

“Don’t you wish.”

“How do you think it’s going?”

She shrugged, making her hoop earrings wobble. “Their case is
basura
, but that doesn’t mean the jury won’t buy it. Juries go for underdogs and you haven’t yet established yourself as one. Ohrbach is doing that. We think he’s buying his shirts with the collar a size too big deliberately, and has developed on purpose that piteous head-waggle.”

“Really? Then that does make me mad. Rita, let’s nail the slippery bastard. May I call you Rita? Tell me, what do you do nights?”

His own nights stretched long and empty, moseying about his skyscraper hotel—a futuristic round tower arisen where two freeways met—with its many levels of under-patronized restaurants. One night he would sit at a counter watching nimble Japanese in chef hats slice steak and vegetables into a kind of edible origami; the next night he patronized the Chinese in their trickling grotto, with its
small arched bridge guarded by a silk-clad hostess. He tried walking out into the night, but the downtown was eerily empty, and felt dangerous. There was only the rustle of palm trees and the roar of freeway traffic. He could never figure out where the movie houses were, or the little Italian restaurants, or the corner newsstands so ubiquitous in New York. In the mornings, however, as Bech climbed up a concrete hill above a chasm where cars vibratingly pummelled the earth and made the air quiver with carbon dioxide, he could feel in the fresh sunlight, faithfully delivered from a cloudless sky, what had fetched and held millions here: a desert clarity, a transparency that ascended from the fragile panorama of pastel buildings to the serene glassy nothingness at the heart of the heavens. No amount of reckless development and ruthless exploitation could hopelessly besmog such sublime air. This was the Promised Land; this was what Israel should have been, not some crabbed, endlessly disputed sliver of the Arab world. The Spanish had been ousted, yet remained, in the architecture, the place names, the ochre tint, the fatalism of this splendid mirage. He would arrive at the courthouse steps with a light sweat started across his shoulder blades, and a faint breathlessness of expectation.

“Oh, you don’t care,” Rita told him. “You must have a lot of girls back east, terribly clever and attractive East Coast girls.”

“I care,” he assured her.

“I do legal homework and cook for my parents and take care of my sister’s kids,” Rita answered. “She performs nude water ballet in a big tank at a businessmen’s bar over in Venice.”

“How about my taking you out to dinner, some night when she’s drying off?”

“Henry, let’s wait until after the verdict. You may not have enough left to pay for a single taco.”

Back in court, the plaintiffs had produced their most amusing witness, who had the jury laughing until tears came; he even elicited a smile from the court stenographer as he pattered away, his fingers falling—like a pianist’s more than a regular typist’s—in chords. The witness was an enormously fat and beautifully spoken process server, a virtuoso of court testimony who, in attempting to subpoena Lanna Jerome, had hid in the bushes and howled outside her condo wall in Palm Springs like a dog, mewed like a kitten, and chirped like a wounded bird. The singer and screen star was notoriously fond of animals, and he had thought thus to create a window of opportunity and slap the papers at her over the sill. No soap. She never stuck her head out. He demonstrated the howl, the mew, and the chirp.

“What is the relevance of all these sound effects?” the judge asked, when the jury’s laughter—slightly forced and sparse at the end, like canned laughter—had died down.

Sergeant Kepper was on his feet. “We have reason to believe, yeronner, that Ms. Jerome has changed her mind and now harbors a more favorable opinion of Mr. Ohrbach’s professional services on her behalf than she did at the time wherein on advice of her unscrupulous counsel he sued her. I mean
she
sued
him.
I misspoke myself, yeronner.”

“Objection. Irrelevant and immaterial and unproven hearsay,” Rantoul said.

“Sustained.” The judge directed the jury to forget the exchange they had just heard, and the process server pulled himself from the witness chair with the practiced skill of a wine steward easing out a champagne cork.

Up in the cafeteria, Rantoul was jubilant. “They keep
opening up that Jerome can of worms like dogs returning to their mess,” he gloated. “She shows up, their case is
toast.”

Gregg Nunn said excitedly, “Did you all notice how through that whole fantastic performance, with the animal noises and everything, Morrie never looked up and kept scribbling notes to himself? He’s given up on this one and is working on his next finagle. The guy never rests; he’s a spider, he spins lawsuits!”

Bech was grateful to Nunn for voicing, in his fey way, his own sense of the plaintiff as a transcendent phenomenon. At night, lying unsleeping and agitated in his hotel room, he felt Ohrbach enclosing him suffocatingly. This room was in the shape of a slice of pie. Bech’s head lay in the narrow end, near the shaft at the core of the round tower, in which elevators throbbed and hummed at all hours: high-priced hookers riding up with their junketing clients from the Pacific Rim, and then riding down alone. Beyond Bech’s twitching feet, gold curtains hid a forest of other glass skyscrapers, in L.A.’s eerily empty and abstract downtown. Ohrbach and his implacable lawsuit had brought Bech here, wedged into this unreal corner of the continent, just as his father had irascibly moved him, on the delicate cusp of puberty, to Brooklyn. The parallel made Ohrbach seem vast, and somewhat benign, as all the forces that create us must, in our instinctive self-approval, seem benign. In spite of his legal team’s warrior spirit, Bech harbored the sneaking suspicion that he and his enemy could strike a deal—indeed
were
, beneath all the vapid legal machinations, invisibly striking a deal. Ohrbach, Bech knew from the way the elderly man’s misty, evasive gaze tenderly flicked past the defendant’s face every morning, loved him; his apparent mercilessness hid a profound, persistent mercy.

Sure enough, the white-haired agent, brought to the stand to testify, oddly dissolved. He scotched his own case. In Rantoul’s phrase, he stopped minding the store. His eyes were now as shy of the jury as they had been of the defense team; he kept gazing down at some three-by-five cards he had brought to the stand, and as the lawyers and the judge sought to resolve some question of procedure, he would compulsively begin annotating them, with an old-fashioned fountain pen that audibly scratched. Kepper tried to lead him through the mental agony of being libelled in
Flying Fur
, but Ohrbach seemed no longer much interested; rather, he wanted to speak of Lanna Jerome, how much he had loved her and her then husband for the many years of their association, how wounded he had been when she inexplicably sued him at the instigation of her new, bouncer husband, and how entirely his affection and admiration for her had survived the mere “legal wars” that he and she had been obliged to wage. He would lay down his life for her, Ohrbach confided to the jury, and down deep he was sure that she felt the same about him.

Had she ever, Kepper asked him, sweatily trying to keep the testimony on track, called him a “gouger”?

“Oh, she might have, but only in fun. In affectionate fun. Exaggeration was her style—a performer’s stock in trade.”

Kepper blanched. Had any of his clients, he asked Ohrbach, ever accused him of gouging, to the best of his recollection?

“There’s always a discussion,” Ohrbach smilingly allowed, “before the exact terms of any arrangement are ironed out. Things are said in heat that neither party actually means.”

Had anybody in his entire life, Kepper asked, almost
shouting in exasperation, ever called him a “gouger,” let alone an “arch-gouger”?

These were creampuff pitches, Bech could see, meant to be knocked out of the park; but Ohrbach was letting them pop into the catcher’s mitt.

His waggling white-crowned head thrust even lower from his oversize collar as the talent agent said, in a shaky, slanting voice that still kept an edge of New York accent, “Well, in fifty years of working the Hollywood mills I’ve been called any number of things. I don’t recall ever seeing it in print, though, until the article by this nice young man.” And his shifty eyes dared follow his withered hand, for a second, in its shy gesture toward the place where Bech had been sitting and stewing day after day. Ohrbach was reaching out. David and Absalom. Joseph and his brothers. The Prodigal Son. Forgiveness, the patriarchal prerogative. Bech fought an impulse to leap up and go kneel before the witness and bow his head for the touch of the blessing his own father had denied.

“Shit,” said Sergeant Kepper. His stubby arms lifted from his sides and slapped back down, like a penguin’s flippers. “I give up.” To the electrified court he apologized, “Sorry, yeronner. I misspoke myself.”

“Didn’t that break your heart?” Bech asked Rita that Saturday night, at a Polynesian restaurant in Venice Beach, where great flaming things were hurried back and forth on platters that sounded wired to amplify the sizzle. “His own lawyer giving up on him.”

“No, Henry,” she said. “My heart is as fragile as any other woman’s, but that did not break it. One shabby performer
crossing up another, it happens all the time. I think our plaintiff’s brain has been scrambled by too many years of
escamoteo.”

“He seemed to miss Kepper’s signals entirely.”

“Your pet gouger is not in his prime—why should that sadden you so?”

The restaurant door was open to the soft California twilight, its pacific silence gashed by the grating sound of skateboards and roller skates hurtling muscular young bodies along.

“Speaking of people in their primes,” he said, “where is the place where your sister does her underwater act?”

“Far from here, in terms of both distance and ambiance. I did not want you to ogle my sister. I want you all for myself, Henry. I am more jealous than your New York sophisticated girls.” With a volcanic burst of flame and a thunderous cascade of scalding fat, their appetizer, Pork Strips à la Molokai, arrived. A pack of Rollerbladers cascaded past. Bech saw, with a simultaneous rising and sinking sensation, that his date had primed herself to go all the way.

The case for the defense was brisk and anticlimactic. Rantoul had found more witnesses than he needed to swear that Ohrbach was no angel. A revered octogenarian mogul from the old studio days, crowned by even more snowy hair than the plaintiff, answered, when asked what Ohrbach’s reputation was in the industry, with a single phrase, “The pits.” Another witness, an actress whose smooth, almond-eyed face was vaguely familiar to millions for having played female co-pilots, androids, and extraterrestrial princesses in low-budget space movies, wept as she described the shockingly fractional fortune left to her after Ohrbach’s ministrations.

Bech found her performance a bit overwrought, but it froze all the profiles of the jury—compacted, from his angle, like one of those patriotic posters Norman Rockwell had crammed with a cross-section of Americans. Not quite all profiles, actually, because one of the two alternates, a large round-faced woman in a series of unfortunate pants suits, had taken to staring at him. Her luminous moon face bothered the corner of his eye all day. Whenever he happened to glance toward her, she gave him a wink. He would have been more heartened by this if she hadn’t been only an alternate. It was a sign, he supposed, of habituation when a locality’s females began to zero in. He had been out here nearly three weeks, at the cost of a thousand or more a day. If he winked back at the alternate juror, the judge might declare a mistrial. Bech determinedly refocused on the back of Ohrbach’s head, and noticed a pathetic little bald spot, a peek of defenseless pink amid the snowy waves, where a cowlick swirled. When he had viewed his father at the Brooklyn morgue, Bech had been struck by how thin his hair had become; as long as Abe Bech was alive, the Grecian Formula, the year-round tan, and his ferocious will had enforced the illusion of a full and bristling head.