Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7) Read online

  He stopped in the middle of the sentence and stared over as the sliding doors to the dining room opened.

  Through the doors stepped an apparition wearing a green rubber suit painted to look like the skin of a vegetable. On top of the person’s head rose a stalk of rubber reeds with little balls on the end. I guess it was supposed to be an asparagus.

  The creature, short and shapeless in the rubber costume, pushed the door shut behind him and stood there.

  McCue jumped to his feet. “Don’t worry, folks,” he shouted. “Electricity will kill it.”

  The creature shuffled forward into the middle of the dance floor and pointed a finger at Scott, who seemed visibly to shrink.

  “Good time?” the creature said. The voice was a man’s voice, deep and gravelly and muffled by the rubber suit. “You say we’re here to have a good time. I saw what you did to my script. You raped my script.”

  I touched McCue’s shoulder and the actor sat down. “Arden Harden?” I asked.

  “Right,” McCue said. “Absolute jerk-off of the western world.”

  “Why is he dressed up to look like an asparagus?” I asked. I noticed that Jack Scott was sputtering and the asparagus was still shaking an accusing finger at him. I thought that it looked like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. If Hamlet had been a rutabaga. Instead of a wimp.

  “He’s short,” McCue said to me.

  “That’s my answer? That’s why he dresses up like a finger food?”

  “He likes to attract attention,” McCue said. “He comes to parties dressed like the Mad Hatter, like Porky Pig, anything to make people look.”

  “Okay for parties,” I said. “But this is like the work situation. I don’t think there’s much room for asparagi in the workplace. Does he show up on the sets like this?”

  “He would if he thought people were ignoring him,” McCue said. He called out again, “I told you, electricity will kill it.” He jumped up from the table, ran across the room, and yanked an extension cord from the wall. He came back and wrapped the end of the cord around the asparagus’s right leg.

  “Quick, somebody. Find a socket. Plug this in,” McCue yelled, holding the end of the extension cord in his hand.

  Harden swatted at it, then bent down and pulled the extension cord loose from his leg.

  Jack Scott recovered, smiled, and said loudly, “As always, ladies and gentlemen, we can count on a spectacular entrance by our head writer, Arden Harden.”

  He tried to lead applause. The smile on Scott’s face was strained and thin and he looked even older than he had entering the room. Nobody joined in the applause.

  “Come on, folks. Let’s hear it for Hollywood’s greatest writer. Arden Harden,” Scott called again. He clapped. Biff Birnbaum chipped in with some desultory clapping and Sheila started as soon as she saw Birnbaum applaud.

  Scott tried to ignore the asparagus in the room.

  “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve said what I wanted to say. I’ve invited us all here this weekend so we could get to know one another, to have some fun, to become one big family, before the rest of the crew arrives on Monday. Let’s have fun and let’s make a great movie.”

  Biff Birnbaum clapped wildly, jumping to his feet for a one-man standing ovation. Roddy Quine next to him looked confused.

  The asparagus wheeled around, grabbed his rubberized waistband, lowered his asparagus trousers, bent over, and mooned Jack Scott.

  “Mark my words,” he intoned. “This movie will be a tragedy.”

  McCue was right; he was very short.

  Tony McCue was still standing there, next to Harden. “You’d better believe it, folks,” he called out. “That’s right from the asparagus’s mouth.”

  Harden shuffled down the length of the room, pulled open the sliding doors, and moved through like a fast-growing ground cover. At the same moment, Clyde Snapp, the caretaker, came into the room wheeling a large silver food cart that I suspect contained desserts. If Snapp thought there was anything unusual about meeting an asparagus in his hallway, his face didn’t register it.

  “Dinner’s buffet tonight, folks,” Birnbaum said. “And let’s not run out after dinner. Let’s stay around and talk about our movie, Corridors of Death.”

  The asparagus stuck his head in the doorway again. “It sucks,” he yelled.

  10

  “So you’re Tracy. Good to meet you. I’m Biff Birnbaum.”

  “I know. We met at the bar before.”

  Birnbaum gave me a toothy grin. I wanted to ask him about his tightly curled hair. Did he have to put rollers in it at night when he went to bed? I wonder about things like that.

  He said, “Sorry. You know how it is. You meet so many people in so short a time.”

  I looked around the room at the seven or so people there, all of whom Birnbaum had met before, and I wondered who he might have confused me with.

  “Sure. I know how it is,” I said. “I have trouble’ remembering people’s names too, Riff.”

  “Biff. It’s Biff. Biff.” He was short but seemed to have large shoulders somewhere under the New York Mets jacket. He had taken the only free seat at our table, so Sheila, who had followed him over, had to bring a chair from another table so that she could sit with us.

  She had stringy hair, dark and dirty-looking, and wore no makeup. I don’t know if it would have done much good. Her features were ordinary, and the best she could hope for would be for someone to say she was nice-looking. Still, I suspected that in New York she would have tried. She would have worn makeup and done her best. But in Hollywood, she was surrounded by beauties, so’I guess she had just surrendered.

  “I’m Sheila Hallowitz,” she told me. She shook my hand firmly. “I’m the assistant producer.”

  Birnbaum had turned his back on me already and was talking to Tony McCue. “So, Tony, are you ready to make the best picture of your life?”

  “Don’t tell me we’re going to scrap this one and do a remake of Quo Vadis?”

  “Very funny,” Birnbaum said, but he was not amused. “I’m afraid we’re paying too much to change directions now. I just wanted to ask you to take it a little easy on Arden. He’s excitable. You know how screenwriters get.”

  McCue shook his head. “You’re sure not paying me enough to make me be nice to Hard-on. The man’s an imbecile. He needs help. Talk to Ramona. He needs a shrink. Or a gardener. That’s it, Barf. I’ve got it. Get him to wear his asparagus costume out into the yard and I’ll hire somebody to run over him with a lawn mower.”

  Birnbaum sighed. “We need him, Tony. There’s a lot of work to do on the script still. If you remember, you’re the one who said that.”

  “Yes. And I’m also the one who told you you ought to get a real writer in, not this lunatic.” McCue poured Birnbaum a glass of straight gin from the bottle he had brought over from the bar. “Have a drink. It’ll cheer you up,” he said.

  “Never drink,” Birnbaum said. He pushed the glass past him. “Here, Sheila, you drink it.” He never bothered to look at her.

  Dutifully she picked it up and sipped at the straight warm liquor. She made a face and tried not to choke.

  Birnbaum tried a different approach. “I think we’re going to have a good time here,” he told McCue. “Even the dinner wasn’t bad.”

  “I think we’re going to have a perfectly shitful time here,” McCue said.

  Birnbaum took a deep breath and turned to me as if trying to find someone friendly to talk to.

  I said, “Any special reason why you wear the Mets jacket?”

  “Just a habit,” he said. “I don’t ever want to forget that I’m from New York.”

  I thought about New York for a moment and said, “Why not?”

  “Street kids. We learn survival in New York. That’s the most important skill you need in Hollywood.”

  “Oh, horseshit,” McCue said. He was good and drunk now and smiling and really getting into it. “You grew up in freaking White Plains. The only time you
saw a New York street was when your high-school class passed through on the way to visit the Planetarium.”

  Birnbaum said, “My heart’s on the New York streets.”

  “Your ass may be too if this movie isn’t any better than your last ones. How many flops in a row is it now?”

  Sheila Hallowitz gently returned a sip of gin to the glass, wiped her mouth, and said, “Biff’s last picture earned out. It’s turning a tidy profit, from our reports.”

  “It might make four dollars,” McCue said, “and that’s only if the gross in Hong Kong is good.”

  “We’re a smash in Europe,” she mumbled, looking down at the table.

  “Trace, for your edification, that means that people haven’t yet started throwing up in the theaters,” McCue explained to me. “That’s what these people call a smash. They spent twenty million to make a film and it grossed five million in the States. All because they forgot to get a script that made any sense. And now they’re doing the same thing here. They hired this exhibitionist asparagus. He’s written a script that’s incomprehensible and they didn’t know it until I told them.”

  “Artists,” Birnbaum said to me. “They’re all like this.” He rose from the table, and as if they were connected at the hip, Sheila Hallowitz rose too.

  “Well, Tony,” Birnbaum said, “we’ll be talking about this a lot more this weekend, I’m sure. Tomorrow you and I will walk out around the property and sight up some good shooting locations. Excuse me, I have to find the men’s room.”

  With Sheila in tow, he left before McCue could respond. He looked unhappy and Sheila looked miserable. She seemed to be the kind of woman born to walk three paces behind and one to the left.

  “Is everything that bad?” I asked McCue.

  He poured himself another drink. “Worse,” he said. “That cretin is what’s wrong with Hollywood today.”

  “This is Jack Scott’s first film?” I asked, and McCue nodded.

  “So far as I know.”

  “Maybe he came to help out. So that Birnbaum didn’t screw things up again,” I suggested.

  McCue croaked out a dry chuckle. “Well, that’s really the stupid leading the stupid,” he said. “Scott’s no prize either. His talk show is flopping and his last three television specials vanished without ever being seen. All he can do here is make things worse. If that’s possible.”

  There was something still gnawing at me. I again asked McCue, “Why are you making this film if you hate it so much?”

  “I’m on a loan-out. I owed a studio a picture, so the studio lent me to Scott to make this turkey.”

  “Don’t you big stars have script approval or whatever they call it?”

  “I gave it up this time so the studio wouldn’t sue me over some problems with the last film. No use, Trace. I’m stuck with this detritus.” McCue stood up and said, “I’ve got to go to the little boy’s room.” He shuffled away from the table, halted five steps away, turned around, and came back for his glass. “In case I get delayed,” he said with a smile, then stumbled away again.

  “Do you realize that we’re the only two sane people in this whole place?” Ramona Dedley said to me. Her eyes looked a little tired. She had started off by refusing drinks, but McCue had worn her down and she had been putting her own hurting on the gin bottle.

  “And I’m not too sure of me,” I said.

  “You’ll keep a close eye on Tony, won’t you?” she said.

  “It’s what I’m paid to do. Why?”

  “I’ve just got bad vibes about this film,” she said.

  “Bad vibes? Is that a professional judgment?”

  “No. Just a hunch,” she said. “I have to go up to my room to freshen up a while. Tell Tony where I am, will you?”

  “Sure,” I said. I offered her a hand, but she waved it away, and got heavily to her feet by herself. She started toward the door in that lurching walk that tipsy people have, especially if they’re inexperienced, with the body tilting forward from the waist. It’s like running downhill, but the problem is you can neither stop nor change directions. I’ve discovered over the years that this is the cause of most traffic collisions with other pedestrians. When I do drunk-walking, I always lean backward. I can’t see my feet in case I trip over something, but I can stop fast.

  Even lurching, Ramona Dedley looked sexy. She barreled through the open doors of the dining room, almost knocking down a small young man wearing a heavy college-style white sweater with big block letters on the front: F U.

  He looked around the dining room and I looked at him. He was hardly five feet tall and wore horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like a praying mantis. His features were pleasant enough, but there was a petulant downturn to his mouth that was close to a scowl.

  He walked over and sat down at my table, facing me.

  “I guess I can talk to you,” he said. “You only look half-stupid.”

  “Appearances can be deceiving,” I said.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “Devlin Tracy. I’m with the insurance company. Who are you?”

  “I’m Arden Harden. I’m the screenwriter.”

  “I didn’t recognize you without hollandaise sauce,” I said.

  “I’ve been outside a long time. I saw you talking to Barf Birnbaum. Did he say anything about my script?”

  “He loved it,” I said. “He said it was the greatest scenario since Gone With the Wind. Or since Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I don’t remember, but he loved it.”

  “Then why’s he keep changing it?” Harden said.

  “I didn’t ask him.”

  “He’s changing everything. You know why they bought my script in the first place?”

  “Because you’re such a pleasant guy everybody wanted to do you a favor?” I suggested.

  “No. They bought it because they wanted the title. Then you know what they did first thing? They changed the title. I wrote Death Stalks the Corridors. It was a deep psychological study of a twisted mind. Now, they’re going to call it Corridors of Death and make it into a goddamn mystery. Why?”

  “It’s a mystery to me,” I said.

  “That’s right. Me too. But Barf and that serving girl of his, Sheila Half-wits, and that horse-faced excuse for a director are jerking around, changing my words. It’s the old Hollywood syndrome. Everybody wants to pee in the soup. Did you know that?”

  “Remind me not to order the soup,” I said.

  “It’s an old Hollywood joke. They hire the best chef in the world to make the greatest soup. Somebody says at lunch that it’s wonderful and the producer and director both agree, but before they eat it, they both stand up and pee in it because they want to give it their own personal touch. They’re peeing on my script. Who are you anyway?”

  “Devlin Tracy. I thought we had already agreed on that.”

  “You sell insurance or something?”

  “No. I’m here to nursemaid Tony McCue for a while. Keep him alive.”

  “They think somebody’s going to murder him?”

  “It’s more like maybe he’ll drink himself to death,” I said. “Or fall out a window or something.”

  “Bet on murder,” Harden said. “I’d like to kill him. What’d he say about my script?”

  “He thinks it’s shit.”

  “That’s because he’s not wearing leotards and a sword. That asshole wants to keep remaking Robin Hood.”

  “Who’d want to kill him?” I asked.

  “Everybody,” he said.

  “You?”

  “Naturally. He changes one of my lines, I’ll cut his goddamn throat with a butter knife. Slow and painful.”

  “Would you like a drink?” I asked.

  “I don’t drink,” he said.

  “Dinner’s already been taken away. Did you eat?”

  “Not any crap they serve here. I travel with my own food. Grains and things. I don’t like hotel shit. Why are you being nice to me?”

  “I thought it was my Christian dut
y.”

  “What’s a Christian doing on a movie shoot? Are you a Christian?”

  “On Saturdays I’m a Christian. On Sundays, I’m a Jew,” I said. “That way I can avoid church all week.”

  “Good thinking,” Harden said.

  “Who else would want to kill McCue?” I asked.

  “I told you. Everybody.”

  “Even Birnbaum?”

  “Especially Barf. You know what his real name is? It’s Irving. That tells you something about his taste. If he wanted to change his name, he could have called himself Irv. Irv Burns or something. That would be a good name. Biff Birnbaum is a joke.”

  “But he wouldn’t kill.”

  “Of course he would. McCue held him up for two million dollars for this picture and its going to be a dud and Barf hates anybody who holds him up for money.”

  “Why’s it going to be a dud if you wrote it and it’s so great?” I asked.

  “First of all, they’re changing it. But even if they didn’t, it’d stink because Barf can’t make movies. He turned down a project of mine two years ago because ’Nobody does martial-arts movies’ and then Karate Kid came out and grossed over a hundred million dollars. I want water. Why don’t you have water at this table?”

  “There wasn’t much call for it with McCue and me here,” I said.

  “You’re another boozer?”

  I shrugged. He looked at me in disgust and reached over to an adjoining table for a pitcher of water and a glass. He had the smallest hands I’d ever seen on a man.

  “You were talking about Birnbaum,” I said.

  “Yes. He can’t make movies even a little bit. He’s too cowardly to make like a Rambo and too stupid to make Dumbo, so he’s going to take my beautiful script and turn it into Limbo. I can see it coming.”

  “Maybe that’s why Scott showed up for this film,” I said.

  Harden waved a hand in dismissal. “Another bean-bag. Do you know that dimbulb started a clothing company so people could dress like him, with those sappy tweed jackets and shit? Now you know why I dress like an asparagus. Anything’s better than dressing like him. Anyway, that company went broke and then he wrote his life story, a pail of illiterate gruel, and it sold about four copies, and his talk show on television stinks and the guy’s a fucking loser.”