Authors: Joe Keenan
We approached in stealth, obtaining our studio drive-on through Max. We easily located the offices of Finch/Donato Productions
and Gilbert led the charge into its serene blond wood antechamber. He gave our names and demanded to see Moira immediately,
adding that if she refused our next stop would be the
LA Times
. The receptionist was a slender young Asian queen whose languorous hauteur could not conceal the raging curiosity Gilbert’s
ultimatum had stirred in his breast. He pressed a button and murmured into his headset.
“Miss Finch will see you shortly,” he said, using only his eyes to direct us to the sofa.
“Oh, right,” scoffed Gilbert. “Like we’re going to sit here while she slips out the back. Fat chance, Madame Butterfly!”
He barged down the hall toward the door that bore Moira’s name in raised brass letters. I trotted behind while the gatekeeper,
who had much to learn about sanctum guarding, struggled to extricate himself from his headset.
When Gilbert burst in, Moira, who was seated in a rich brown suede chair, leaped up, a radiant smile of welcome on her face.
“Well, look who it is! What a nice surprise!”
We were thrown by her cordiality until we realized that her performance was purely for the benefit of her illustrious guest,
who rose now from the matching sofa.
“I’d like you to meet two dear old friends of mine, Philip Cavanaugh and Gilbert Selwyn. We go back ages! Guys, this is Harrison
Ford.”
We didn’t chat very long with Harrison, but he struck me as a very polite, genial, and, I hasten for clear reasons to add,
non-male-bordello-patronizing sort of fellow.
“Nice to meet you, Harrison,” I said, moving toward him and extending my hand. As I was congratulating myself for having struck
just the right warm-but-not-fawning note, my shin collided with the coffee table, striking it so hard that Harrison’s coffee
sloshed over.
“You all right there?”
“Ow! Yes, fine! Hope we’re not interrupting?”
Harrison said they’d just been discussing a “little project” but were pretty much done. He bade us farewell and Moira saw
him out, asking him to think it over and call her. When she’d closed the door she walked calmly to her desk, picked up a lovely
Montblanc pen, and stabbed Gilbert in the neck with it.
“OWW!”
“You miserable fuckers! If you EVER try to threaten your way in here again I’ll have your damn legs broken! I mean it! And
you
—!” She jabbed a red-lacquered nail at me. “You starfucking jackass! I’ve been on the phone all morning trying to calm Stephen
down and convince him I can handle this mess you’ve made! I don’t know what the old queen wants but it better be reasonable
or I swear to God I’ll whack him!”
“I’m bleeding, you crazy bitch!” cried Gilbert, dabbing his neck with a hankie.
“Baby.”
She sat behind her desk, its chair imperially high, and glared across at us.
“If you’re looking for your final script payment, have your agent call. If you’re looking for anything else, fuck off.”
Gilbert, his attempt to project manly menace badly undercut by his canary yellow Miyake T, demanded that we be reinstated
as the sole authors of
The Heart in Hiding.
“We worked our asses off on that script and it’s a damn good one!”
“Sorry. I disagree.” She said this while initialing some papers, having already acquired the mogul’s knack of compounding
an insult by multitasking while delivering it. “I read it and frankly I thought it lacked pathos.”
“Pathos!”
roared Gilbert. “You wouldn’t know pathos if pathos threw a bar mitzvah in your vagina!”
“So we disagree,” yawned Moira. “And I’m the producer.”
“Fine then! We’ll just go to the
LA Times
and tell them what kind of hotel you were running!”
“Ooh! I’m so scared!” exclaimed Moira, waving her hands with annoying vigor like Mandy Patinkin performing a minstrel song.
Then she relaxed and leaned back in her chair.
“Fine. Go to the papers. They won’t print what they can’t prove. I’ll deny it and let them know my accusers are two writers
I fired off a project when I found out their spec was
stolen
. I’ll make sure the whole town knows what you idiots did. Trust me, you’ll never make the word ‘madam’ stick to me but ‘plagiarist’
will dog you to your graves. So,” she said brightly, “anything else, kids? Or was that your best shot?”
Sadly it was, Gilbert being the impetuous sort of warrior who rushes into battle with scant regard for the contents of his
quiver. Moira rose, signaling that we were dismissed. But just as I stood, bitterly regretting that we had no means to wipe
the triumphant smirk off her face, a lovely thing happened. Her phone buzzed, she answered it, and, whatever she heard, her
smile vanished so abruptly she might have been a doorman on December twenty-sixth.
“Just send him in,” she said testily, then told us to beat it. Gilbert and I exchanged a pointed glance and defiantly resumed
our seats. We’d surmised from her sudden dyspepsia that her surprise visitor was none other than Monty and this was not a
skirmish we intended to miss. I only prayed the old scamp had brought along his squirting boutonniere.
Alas, Moira’s visitor was not Monty but a man whose arrival curdled my own smile as swiftly as it had Moira’s.
“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice, Miss Finch,” said District Attorney Rusty Grimes.
He glanced my way and I waved a limp hand in greeting.
“Hello, again.”
“Have we met?”
“Yes. At the bar at Vici. Phil Cavanaugh.”
He squinted in confusion.
“I was with Stephen Donato?”
He squinted again and I realized we had not in fact met because he was not in fact Rusty Grimes. The resemblance, however,
was uncanny.
“Sorry. I thought you were the DA.”
“S’okay. I get that a lot. I’m his brother, Hank Grimes.”
I soon discovered that in addition to sharing Rusty’s unfortunately bulbous features, he also had his brother’s off-putting
cockiness and snide machismo.
“Now that I think of it, I remember runnin’ into Rusty that night. He told me he’d stopped by to see his kid and had a run-in
with Stevie and a little
friend
of his.”
He gave the word “friend” about four extra “n”s and, lest his innuendo be missed, added an extra “s” or two to “his.”
“Gosh, Hank,” I said, “I’m kinda missing your inference here. Perhaps if you put on a dress and sang ‘Over the Rainbow.’ ”
There it was again, that fatal impulse of mine to twit the constabulary. It had not been wise at Vici with Rusty and was even
less wise here in the midst of what, unless I missed my guess, was an actual criminal investigation. Foolish, yes, but what
can I say? Show me a surly soldier and right away I’m Eve Arden.
“They were just going,” said Moira.
“Wait, you say your name’s Cavanaugh?” he asked, pulling a notebook from his pocket and checking a page. “Stick around, pal.
I got some questions for you too.”
He asked Gilbert his name, then consulted his list again.
“Bingo. Trifecta,” he said and, seating himself, commenced his interrogation.
His performance, in less dire circumstances, would have struck me as an amusingly clichéd rendition of the old-school tough
cop. The body language was insolently relaxed as though he owned the joint and the voice suggested extensive elocution lessons
from Mickey Spillane. Every gesture and inflection was calculated to convey that he was The Law, that we had run afoul of
it, and that when the state finally slapped numbers on our chests the brewskis would be on him.
“Just correct me, Miss Finch,” he said, his tone sarcastically deferential, “if I’m wrong on any of my facts here. You are
the owner and former full-time proprietor of Les Étoiles, a spa and resort hotel in Bel-Air?”
“Yes.”
“You recently formed this production company in partnership with Stephen Donato?”
“Yes,” she repeated, her tone flatter this time to convey impatience.
“Prior to forming this company you had no previous producing experience?”
Moira’s lengthy response touched on the many projects she and Albert had been developing before his untimely death, but boiled
down to no.
“You met Mr. Donato through these gentlemen here some eight weeks ago?”
“That’s correct.”
“One of them, Mr. Selwyn I believe, is your ex-husband?”
“Correct,” came Gilbert’s arch reply.
“Gee,” said Hank, cocking an eye at Gilbert’s yellow Miyake T, “I wonder what broke that little romance up. Wouldn’t you say,
Miss Finch, that eight weeks is an awfully short time to know someone before starting a business together?”
“Not if you click, which Stephen and I did immediately. He found me very creative.”
“Makes two of us. Let’s cut to the chase, okay? We have a suspect in custody, we’ll call him Kenneth. Good-looking kid, midtwenties.
Male prostitute. Last week a john of his dropped dead while Kenny was with him. Heart attack. Drugs were involved and we’re
pretty sure Kenny supplied ’em. We hauled him in after he went on a shopping spree with the old guy’s MasterCard. Not a bright
boy, Kenny. His lawyers said if we went easy on him he could deliver a big fish. That fish was you.”
No one does bewildered innocence better than Moira. She regarded him with the guileless stare of a little match girl accused
of arson.
“What on earth did he say I’ve done? I’ve never broken the law in my life!”
“Not to hear Kenny tell it. He says he worked at your spa for three months as a ‘massage therapist.’ He says that during that
time he had sex over fifty times with sixteen different men, most of them prominent in the entertainment field. He says he
did so with your full knowledge and that both he and the spa were well paid for his services. He says there were seven other
hustlers working there as well and that three of them claimed to have had sex with Stephen Donato. He also believes but can’t
prove that the sex was filmed.”
To quote a recent screenplay of ours, Moira was “shocked— shocked!” at these accusations, which she declared utterly groundless
and libelous to boot.
Hank grinned. “Maybe so. But they go a long way toward explaining how you got yourself such a sweet deal with Stephen—which
means you can throw in extortion too.”
“First pandering, now extortion!” huffed Moira. “What are you going to charge me with next? Arms traffcking?!”
“No one’s charged you with anything, Miss Finch. Yet. We’re just asking questions.”
Moira, speaking with glacial disdain, said that if this Kenny had ever in fact worked at her spa he was clearly someone she’d
fired for drug use who was now paying her back by concocting this spiteful fiction.
“If I may be frank, Mr. Grimes, it both wounds and disgusts me that you’ve fallen for such a tale. I can’t believe you’d take
the word of a self-admitted thief, dope-dealer, and prostitute over that of a hardworking Christian businesswoman and grieving
widow! Please leave my office this instant!”
But Grimes wasn’t done. He had several questions for Gilbert and me, most of which hinted disconcertingly at collusion in
Moira’s enterprise. Why had we brought Stephen to Les Étoiles? Had we been compensated in any way? Could we describe our visits
there? Had we observed any activities consistent with Kenny’s accusations? We perjured ourselves as vigorously as Moira had,
for we knew beyond question that if she went down she’d find a way to take us with her.
“I mean, c’mon!” I said with a desperate chuckle. “If a guy wants to have illicit gay sex, does he really invite his wife
and mom to tag along?”
Hank leered knowingly. “Maybe that’s the part he gets off on. Makes it dirtier.”
Moira, refusing to brook such vile aspersions against her partner, strode angrily to the door. Before hurling it open, she
crossed her arms sternly and said, “Don’t think I don’t know what this is about. Your brother’s had a personal vendetta against
Stephen for years. He’s also running for governor this fall and could use another sensational case to whip up his homophobic
supporters. You tell him for me that Stephen and I will not be scapegoated! And if he leaks one word of these malicious lies
to the press I will sue him into the ground for libel!”
Hank just laughed, tickled by her pique. “I’ll be in touch, Miss Finch,” he said as he ambled past her.
“And by the way,” he added, his words a disquieting echo of Lily’s, “it’s not libel if you prove it.”
I
ONCE READ AN ARTICLE ABOUT
the unanimity with which depressed San Franciscans agree that, if you’re going to off yourself, the Golden Gate Bridge is
absolutely
the
only place to do so, all lesser bridges being poor substitutes, resort to which risks exposing oneself to comment at the
memorial. One fellow who miraculously survived his plunge said that the instant he’d leaped he realized there was no problem
in his life he could not solve save the one he’d just created for himself by stepping off the Golden Gate Bridge. As we pulled
out of the Pinnacle lot I felt a pang of empathy for that poor jumper, for I too could now see how laughably trivial were
the concerns that had consumed me only an hour ago.
You’ve been fired off a movie? Big deal! It was a crappy story anyway! Stop whining! Write a new one!
Your closeted megastar boyfriend has dumped you? Boo hoo! Is he the
only
closeted megastar in town? Hardly! Get out there! Become a Scientologist! Meet people!
The DA wants to nail you on charges ranging from pandering and extortion to conspiracy and obstruction of justice? Okay —
that’s
a problem! That, my friend, is the difference between inconvenience and actual Peril. And the peril, it grieves me to report,
only deepened once Hank left Moira’s office.
The moment she slammed the door she stridently informed us what revenge she’d exact if we were so foolhardy as to cooperate
with the police. She’d say we were full-blown accomplices who’d lured Stephen to Les Étoiles with full knowledge of her intentions.
She also told us that, were we to check our most recent bank statements, we’d find that ten thousand dollars had been deposited
into our accounts the day after we’d delivered Stephen to her.