After A.D. went through his stack of one-dollar chips he went back to the room and found Walker asleep. The pages were on the floor beside the bed. After A.D. read them, he wrote out a rough contract establishing that he had paid Walker ten thousand dollars and therefore was part owner of the script, along with Wesley, who up until then had paid out seventy-five hundred. Before he went to sleep he found a secretary in the casino’s office to type up the contract in legalized English.
When Walker and A.D. found themselves awake at the same time, they ate, gambled for a few minutes, and drove down the road toward Las Vegas. It was night and the road was empty with calm humpbacked mountains on either side of them. After fifty miles of driving A.D. said, “I read the pages. Your old man is never going to go for that blow job. He’s had John Wayne and those other righteous old dudes riding through his flicks.”
“I owe him a blow job. He can do what he wants with it.”
“Well, that’s a family problem,” A.D. said. “And I never mess with family problems, not even my own.”
“We’ll red line the scene,” Walker said. “His films never get that close to sex, at least not the explicit kind.”
“Whatever you say, partner,” A.D. said, trying to promote his new image as skillful producer. “I don’t want to turn off your flow. I’m just telling you that the script doesn’t altogether play for me. If Jim and Lacey could take up with one of those weird hippies in the train and get themselves into a steamy triangle, then you’d have yourself a hook. I’d follow a hook like that into deep water, especially if you had two women on either side of the sandwich. And I’m not a deepwater man.”
“The main characters are pretty well set.”
“Does that mean you’re sticking to what went down over there? Because if you are, we might have trouble moving this one off the lot.”
“The facts have to be somewhere in the room or the old man won’t pay attention.”
“Herd them into the corner,” A.D. said. “Out of the story’s way.”
They stopped at a small hotel-casino in Ely, a run-down mining town halfway to Las Vegas. Over apple pie and coffee A.D. produced the contract for Walker to sign.
“You’re making your move,” Walker said, looking over the contract.
“It’s now or never,” A.D. said. “And I’m taking my inspiration from the now jar.”
“Who do you see in the middle of this triangle you’ve set up?” Walker asked. “Me, you, or the old man?”
“In a triangle there’s only a middle if you start to lose,” said A.D., who had no idea what he was really saying. “And that won’t happen.”
“I assume you’ve contacted a top lawyer?”
“Out of L.A. and on the case. The same one that’s suing your old man and the entire State of New Mexico. And you, too, now that I think of it.”
“I admire your gusto,” Walker said. “You might even make an acceptable producer. You’re certainly desperate and greedy enough. Of course, India will test you. India has been known to eat producers alive.”
“Finish the script and I’ll hire a rewrite man to switch it to Brazil.”
“Now you’re talking like a man I can trust,” Walker said. “A man who can get the job done, no matter what the sacrifice.”
“Look, Walker,” A.D. said in an effort to nail down his intentions once and for all. “I’ve been on the road and I’ve sniffed up other people’s exhaust. This is America. You’re allowed to change horses in midstream. That’s what the brochure says and that’s what I’m going to do. You’re my connection to some of that gold from the image bank, and I’m asking you: are you going to sign or not?”
“What’s in it for me?”
“A way back into the action. You’re out of touch, in case you haven’t noticed. But I’m your transformer. That’s a producer’s job.”
“How do you know I won’t phone in the information to the old man and have done with it? I mean, all he’s hanging in for is to find out about Clem.”
“You won’t do that. But if you do pull the plug on me, I’ll break half the bones in your body. I’m playing hardball now, Walker. Forget dreamball.”
“In that case, I’ll sign,” Walker said. He was enjoying A.D.’s intensity. “But if you’re the producer you shouldn’t get any more money from the old man. That’s for the writer.”
“That’s not the way it works,” said A.D., who had already lost more than half of the four thousand he had set aside for himself. “My money is supervising money. To see that you stay out of trouble and get the script done. Your old man knows that a man without product is only half a man. He wants to see you up on your feet and fully wrapped.”
Walker signed the contract and put the ten grand in his pocket.
They drove the rest of the way in silence, arriving in Las Vegas for breakfast and checking into Caesar’s Palace, a place they both knew too well. A.D. had played his share of gigs there in the past and Walker had wandered through on various lost weekends out of and away from Beverly Hills, mostly for championship fights and long bouts of compulsive fucking. After they had slept for a few hours, A.D. went off to the post office in the blazing sun to pick up the cashier’s check from Wesley, and Walker went to the casino.
Walker played recklessly, without paying much attention to the cards, and lost over two thousand dollars in an hour. He didn’t mind losing. In fact, more than a part of him was engaged in losing, and he played hundred-dollar chips without caution or design. It was 11 a.m. and there weren’t many people around and the air had been pumped full of oxygen so that there was more than enough to go around. Despite the ionized air the blackjack dealers were more mechanical and bored than usual, and Walker changed tables a few times, either for luck or because he didn’t like a dealer’s vibrations. As he was about to leave and quit playing altogether, a woman sat down next to him. Her fingers were elegant and Oriental, with long tapering fingernails and an absence of rings. He guessed that she was Chinese. When he finally looked at her face she was more complicated than that. She was Eurasian, and her flat opaque eyes reflected only weariness and the distant possibility of play for pay. She wore a black silk dress with a high neck and the usual slit on the side. A delicate survey of wrinkles was visible on her upper neck and around her eyes. But it was her utter fatigue that comforted Walker, as when she checked him out while lighting a cigarette, her eyes staring blankly through him, bored and unseeing. He forgot about her while he won and then lost a few hundred dollars, but when she got up to leave he followed in her wake, sitting next to her at another table. After she lost, he shoved a pile of chips toward her. They played anonymously until the cocktail waitress came around and he bought her a brandy and soda.
“What do you have in mind?” She tapped on the table for a card replacement.
“I thought we might spend some time together.”
As they got up to leave, a hand touched Walker’s shoulder. The hand was large and well manicured and belonged to a tall, distinguished man in horn-rimmed glasses and gray sideburns. He was dressed in a white tennis outfit and carried two racquets. Next to him was a smaller, rotund man and a thin blond girl with a perfectly shaped Revlon face. They, too, wore white tennis outfits.
“Walker Hardin. My God.” The man in the horn-rimmed glasses seemed genuinely shocked. “I thought you were in China or Korea or someplace.”
Walker nodded, trying to place the man’s face.
“Ben,” the man said, picking up on Walker’s disorientation. “Ben Copperthwaite. I was production manager on
The Last Charge
. You and your sister were in that scene on the river. Jesus, you must have been no more than eleven or twelve. An obnoxious brat. Remember? The boat tipped over. I’ll never forget it. Your old man flipped out and fired a busload of people.”
Walker didn’t remember but he said he did and they chatted for a while, Ben introducing his tennis partners with names Walker immediately forgot and Walker mumbling a reference to the exhausted woman standing next to him as “one of my Eastern business partners.”
“I have my own production company now.” Ben’s tight busy smile took in Walker’s sneakers, bandaged leg, cut-off jeans, red cowboy shirt, and dark glasses, as well as the silver-tipped cane A.D. had bought him. “Three to five pictures a year, although I’ll tell you, L.A. feels like Detroit in the thirties. Nothing moving. Absolutely nothing. All they want are these thirty-million-dollar cartoons or some jerk-off soap that can’t get on without one of six stars who get two or three million guaranteed. It’s obscene. No one pays anyone and no one makes decisions. But you know all that bullshit. Tell me, Walk, what are you up to?”
“I’m writing a script.”
“It’s in your blood, that’s for sure. I’m still a big fan of your father’s, you know. I’ve heard the stories, of course.”
“He’s in Mexico.”
“Sensational,” Ben said. “He can work for me anytime. Tell him I love him and that he’s one of the real articles we have left in this rotten business. He’s a professional, not one of these amateur bimbos I seem to have to deal with all the time.” His eyes shifted to take in A.D. as he appeared by Walker’s side, looking unexpectedly sartorial in gray Giorgio Armani slacks and a black Pierre Cardin shirt with bone-white buttons. All highlighted by his black eye patch.
“My producer,” Walker said, making the introductions.
“You’re working with a first-class talent,” Ben said to A.D. “Join us in my suite and we’ll celebrate.”
Walker tried to beg off but A.D. was insistent and the Oriental woman whose name turned out to be Rosie didn’t seem to mind one way or the other, and so they took the elevator up to Ben’s suite, which was furnished with a piano, winding staircase, pink velvet couches, ceiling-to-floor columns, and a three-foot television screen.
“Now tell me about the project,” Ben said as the portly man helped him slip into a maroon smoking jacket and went off to make a round of Bloody Marys.
“It’s a love story that takes place in India,” A.D. said, planting his feet on top of a glass coffee table. “A triangle between three Americans. Wesley is obsessed with it, especially as Walker is writing it. There is a lot of intensity between these two. I went down to New Mexico while he was shooting and talked to him about it, and it turns out that he’s always been fascinated by the East. When Walker showed up having been over there, well, you know, it was a natural.”
“I love it,” Ben said. “It’s like the Fondas or John and Walter Huston going off to make
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. And of course there are all those frozen rupees in India just waiting for American investors. It makes sense, financially, creatively, emotionally. You can live like a maharaja. I did a little film once in Bali. It was never released, but it was one of the most satisfying trips in my entire life.”
“Peaches and cream,” the blond girl said. “I’d love to go on a trip like that.”
Ben patted her on the leg.
The portly man, who appeared to be some sort of assistant, went over a side table behind the TV screen and made a series of intense phone calls. The blond girl asked Rosie if she had ever heard of a certain skin lotion she was now using, and Rosie shrugged and said she didn’t think so but that she had tried a lot of different lotions and she often found herself doing things and then not really remembering them.
“Seriously,” Ben asked, “how is Wes? Everyone says he should check into the puzzle factory. I just hope it’s not his health.”
“The script has given him a second life,” A.D. said. “He can’t wait to get into the saddle again. You can’t believe the ideas he comes up with.”
“Money is hard these days,” Ben said. “Especially if you’re seventy years old and just fired off a film and your last three efforts have taken dives at the box office.”
“The man’s a legend in his own time,” A.D. insisted.
“No question about that.” Ben smiled at A.D. in a way that let him know he was under suspicion of being an amateur bimbo. “No doubt you have private financing already locked up. Hell, if Wesley pulled one off no one would applaud more than me. I trust you have a backup country if India doesn’t pan out?”
“Mexico,” A.D. said. “Or some place like that.”
“If you switch locations south of the border, come and see me. And Walker, I’m interested in the script. Especially if Wesley decides it’s time to write his memoirs. In fact, let’s get together when you get back to town. Say at the end of the week.”
Walker said he would get in touch and then asked Rosie if she was ready to leave.
“You’re welcome here,” A.D. said to her warmly.
She looked from one to the other, weighing her needs, and then stood up next to Walker, who shook hands with Ben and clapped A.D. on the shoulder, telling him how much faith he had in him as a producer. Then he and Rosie took the elevator down to his room.
Rosie kicked off her shoes and went straight to bed, sliding in between the sheets.
“Do you want me?” she asked.
“I think so,” Walker said, sitting down on the edge of the bed.
She stared up at him with her hard weary eyes. “I might nod out on you if you don’t get it on soon. I’ve been working too hard. I need a vacation.”
“I haven’t made it with anyone for a few years,” he confessed.
“You must be a fag. Not that it makes any difference. I’m good with fags as long as they don’t get too emotionally weird on me.”