City of Angles, page 22
She wondered what the priest was thinking. She had the sense that he might be playing with his thumbs or fingers. But overall she had a feeling of stillness. The church was nearly empty, and the only noise was a mop that was running over a distant stretch of floor. The minister’s placement in the confessional set him in profile. She knew that his focus was upon her. This was not a priest who was somewhere else. He was with her. Still, it took some time for him to collect his thoughts. His voice then was very gentle, almost hushed. It was the sort of tone that she had used herself when she was talking to her children as they were falling asleep.
“You’re married?”
“We’re not.”
“But he’s a citizen?”
“As are the children.”
“I know something about this consular processing. My mother had to go through it.”
“She did?”
Although it was impossible to see him nodding through the screen, small as the gesture must have been, she had the vague awareness of it.
“This case is important. I suppose you know that the whole country is following it. I know someone in the government who might be able to help. I can talk with him. But I would like you to do something first.”
“Alex and I have to marry?”
“You don’t have to. I’ll help you either way.”
“You would like me to?
“It is a sacrament…Would you like me to officiate?”
She could not say no. Quite suddenly, then, her thoughts shifted away from the priest and the wooden closet she was in. It was as though she had been supernaturally transported outside the box, passing from shadow to light, as she began to daydream about the dress she would be wearing.
Chapter 40
Billy wasn’t angry when he realized that Claire was gone. He was in a state of exultation. More even than when he had first slept with her, he was intoxicated.
He understood that she was guarded and often self-centered. There were concerns, too, about the child. Was it his? If it was, had she tried to exhibit it as another Mike Fruchtman production? Yet these questions hardly seemed to matter. She was Claire Hesper, and she had gone to bed with him. It had happened a second time. He was really in the running to be her boyfriend or husband. It was as though the Swiss Guards in the Vatican had successfully planned a moon landing. Or, rather, given his ancestry, it was as though an Israeli was standing on the top step when they were awarding the medals after the hundred-meter race at the Olympics. It was incredible. A shaft of light peeked in through a window and reflected from the plate glass on the cabinets and closets. It made the objects in his living room shine: the chair, the floor, the plastic covers of the DVDs. Outside, the sky was perfectly blue, the air devoid of smog. It did not seem possible.
Even so, he was not heading that morning to Claire’s place. He was fulfilling a very public obligation by driving to the women’s detention section of a jail in Santa Paula, California. This was where Vincenza had been transferred.
The best that could be said of the trek was that it was against the flow of traffic. The 101 North took him past the modernist mansions of Coldwater Canyon. There he had picked up the 405. That brought him onto the old I-5 with its innumerable gas station and diner exits. Turning onto one of these, he plunged into the undulating course of the 127 West. Then, ninety minutes after he had started out in Hollywood, he was parking his car at the Todd Road Jail, a horizontal line of windowless buildings within which Ventura County housed its women detainees.
Just two news vans and not more than a dozen reporters were in the lot. This absence of a crowd seemed to Billy an elegantly neat solution to an old philosophical question: When a tree falls past the Los Angeles county line, has it really happened? As his view nonetheless continued to be that it had, he posed for pictures, refused to answer the reporters’ questions, and then entered the main structure, signing in at the visitors’ desk. There he found that he was compelled to wait far longer than he had at Lynwood. Vincenza had a meeting with her lawyer that was to take precedence. It was uncertain how long that would take, and because the jail required him to give up his electronic devices and all reading materials, there was nothing for him to do but ponder and look about. Still, he was cheery. Claire had even tried to focus on his pleasure. Was this a herald, a portent full of wonder, a miraculous event presaging a future sex life with her in which she considered his satisfaction?
He was conscious of how much he was smiling, and he worried that he was out of place or that his keenness might be irksome. Yet, as he gazed about, he saw the faces around him were markedly different from those he had eyed at the Lynwood. Even the lawyers in the visitors’ room seemed jaunty and optimistic. Plain as it was that they knew each other, he watched as they bantered.
Brightly lit, the room reverberated with expectant chatter. Because the jail housed inmates of both sexes, along with the mentally ill and those awaiting bail, there were girlfriends with unrinsed hair and tattoos and the well-dressed parents of deranged offspring. There were even a few married men there for their wives. Most, though, appeared to fall into just two categories: lawyers and mothers of the accused.
The attorneys were dressed in flashy suits matched to highly polished dress shoes. The striking thing about the matriarchs was their thin hair. Almost without exception and regardless of their race, they displayed bright patches of scalp on the tops of their round heads.
The one attorney not part of the fraternity was Vincenza’s own, Jerry D’Allesandro. While they had only spoken on the phone, Billy recognized his face from his frequent appearances on TV. In these, he persistently lambasted the prosecutor’s office for leaking details of the case, insisting upon Vincenza’s innocence. During these moments, he projected a mix of righteous fervor and arch self-awareness.
Like Billy himself, he had driven up from LA, and, noticing him, he approached, introducing himself and offering Billy a hand. He was a head taller than Billy, easily twice his weight, and smelled of greasy food. His hand swallowed Billy’s own as a boy’s is enveloped by his father’s. Yet avuncular as D’Allesandro was, Billy was neither intimidated nor threatened. That the attorney loved engaging with people was hard to miss. He gestured towards a leather satchel around his shoulder. “I’ve got the stuff to get the case dismissed. Or I think I can get it,” he said.
“I believe you. And I believe her.”
“But…?
“Well, I mean, everyone is wondering: How did the body wind up in her trunk?”
D’Allesandro beamed. His expression told Billy that there was a perfectly reasonable answer and that he wanted to say what it was, but that he couldn’t just yet. Still, Billy realized that the lawyer had a specific aim in mind that he had come over to offer him his hand.
“You want something of me, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do,” he allowed. “There’s a way you can help her that may not be obvious.”
“Go ahead.”
While there was something comforting in D’Allesandro’s manner, Billy did not like the way he was hovering over him. Nor was he drawn in by the pungent odor of fried food glazed onto D’Allesandro, and Billy motioned for him to sit down and speak more quietly so that they would not be overheard. Taking the cue, D’Allesandro rested himself on a plastic seat at his side, hunching forward.
“I think you know that leaving a cult is one of the hardest things a person can do,” he said. “You lose all your friends. You lose your identity. You lose your sense of purpose. You even lose your past. What did the last ten years of your life mean without it? It’s probably easier to accept divorce or the death of a parent.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“Vincenza knows that the Church played some role in this. But she needs to really part herself from them—in order to open up and give me some additional things I need. Details.” He paused. “It seems you’re one of the few people right now she’s even in touch with, who’s speaking to her. And I think she respects you. Can you help me? Make her see that she has to tell me everything there is about them? Including about their leader? The man she’s followed for the last decade?”
“I’m sorry I lied to you. About the meth gang and everything. You’re one of the few guys who’s treated me decent. That means something. A lot, actually.”
Billy shrugged in response. He and Vincenza were sitting side by side in the visiting area. She was not looking her best. Her hair was stringy, and she was sleep deprived. Then, of course, there was the absence of makeup and the shapeless jumpsuit. Four sizes too large, it concealed her figure. Still, it was hard not to notice the delicacy of her features and the radiant, almost cobalt shade of her eyes. Even without mascara, the black of her eyelashes contrasted and complemented with their deep blue.
Because D’Allesandro’s presence had meant more waiting, it had been almost two hours from the moment that Billy had arrived at the jail until he was beside her. The process of getting to see her had not only been lengthy but elaborate. He had been searched, and he had given up his identification. He had signed an assortment of forms, and then he had passed through a series of hallways divided by heavy, metal security doors.
The room they were in was at least seventy feet long, and it had the vaulted ceiling of a high school gym. Beneath were forty or fifty people. Perhaps a third were inmates. Around them were small children happy to see their incarcerated parents. As they tossed themselves into their mothers’ laps, the hair-deprived grandmothers gave them stern looks. This variety of sounds and voices served to make his and Vincenza’s private. Now, as Billy gazed at her, she smiled back.
“I think I’ve kind of been leading my life wrong,” she said.
“The dispensary?”
“Not just the pot.” She looked at him with an expression that was hard not to understand. It all but asked him why he hadn’t made a pass at her when she had been staying with him. Then, perhaps embarrassed by this, she turned her head and stared off into space. What she said, though, continued the thought. “Are you involved with anyone?”
“Would you be asking me that if you weren’t in jail?” He did not say this in an accusatory way. Nonetheless, he was grateful that she was amused and not offended by the question.
“I notice you didn’t answer my question—which I guess is an answer.”
“Since you were arrested, yes, something sort of happened. My sort-of girlfriend.”
She took this news in without rancor. Sitting side by side, they were alternating between looking at one another and the other inmates. Now she turned to him once more. “You thought I was just being a flirt when I introduced myself? In the coffee shop?”
“Honestly?”
“Well, you’re wrong. You looked different. I guess I was already aware that I had to do things different. My life, I mean.”
“Thanks.”
“You have a question?”
Billy took this as his cue. Nodding, he accepted what she was saying. Then he made her the pitch that had been requested of him. “Your lawyer spoke to me back in the waiting area—”
“He thinks this—what happened—is connected to the Church? And wants me to tell him everything about that?”
“James Armstrong. You know what he’s talking about?”
Her eyes told him that she did.
While the jail permitted the inmates nearly unlimited time for attorney conferences, it allowed just two thirty-minute meetings each week for other visitors, and they knew that their time would soon be up. So they talked then of more mundane topics and not again with such intimacy. Even so, as he was leaving, they glanced at each other as people do when they share a secret.
Chapter 41
They had a plan. He had laid it out to her. They had agreed upon it. He would do most of the talking.
A Mike Fruchtman production was not nothing, and he had been in many of these meetings. He had known Todd Gelber for seventeen years. On several occasions, he had been to Gelber’s home, and he had often negotiated with him. Back when Gelber was a talent agent, he had once gotten a phone call: One of Gelber’s clients needed to leave a production a week early. As a favor, he had reversed the order for the shooting of several scenes of a movie they were making so that the actress could fly to Vancouver to be on another set.
Yet what had happened? Almost as soon as they were seated on the couch in Gelber’s huge office, Claire had hijacked the meeting, turning it into her pitch for her remake of Fatal Attraction.
Part of the problem was the angle. Because it was supposed to be woman-oriented and feminist, it did seem natural for her to explain it. Then there was the abortion. Somehow that gave her a sort of moral immunity. He was beholden. And as they went down in the elevator afterwards and he gradually processed what had happened, he couldn’t but be aware of what had occurred. Though they had gotten the greenlight, she was going to try and screw him out of a credit and a producer’s fee. He was taken back to his first days in the business and the fashion in which he had been cheated out of a credit on a Denzel picture.
It was the one essential thing he had taught her, the immutable and eternal principle of the business: Get it in writing. She now had an option on the property. He didn’t. That was all there was to it. It had simply never occurred to him that this seemingly harmless little blonde with her pale skin and her delicate calves could be capable of such treachery.
The worst thing was that his longtime acquaintance with Gelber meant nothing. He could see it: Gelber had a schedule to fill, and the Fatal Attraction remake made sense. It would sell service subscriptions. He could imagine it already. Before the day was out, Gelber or one of his assistants would be calling Claire—not him—to hash out the terms. Then they would work with her to find out what Anne Hathaway’s availability was. Or was it Sarah Paulson? Laura Dern? Might they even aim for Nicole Kidman? Reese? But he had set the meeting up! He had used his industry capital to arrange things!
He could feel it in the way she was standing in the elevator. She was being perfectly pleasant. Yet he sensed it: her assurance, her smugness. She had gotten what she wanted. She had used him. The smile was insufferable. After all he had done for her, introducing people to her, explaining the finer points of contracts, mentoring her!
Leaving the elevator, pacing back to their cars, they began the post-mortem. But for her it was no post-mortem. It was living, breathing. She was glowing and radiant. The closer they got to their cars—his Bentley, her leased BMW—the more annoyed he became. Here, in the parking garage, they were out of earshot of the streaming service’s staff. That meant he could be direct, and it struck him that if he were to put a stop to her scheme that he had to do it at once. With Gelber’s approval, a project like this would gather momentum quickly, moving rapidly ahead without him. It was the old cliché about how once the train left the station and you weren’t on it, there was no way to get on. Yet he had trained her in how to keep him off the choo-choo!
Knowing he had to do something, he grabbed her by the arm. It was not a violent grip, but it startled her. Then she stared at him. The expression said it all. It declared her superiority, asking him what he was doing and who he thought he was, and, rather meekly, he let go.
“Sorry. I’m sorry, Claire.”
“OK.”
“I just…”
She did not even speak to him in reply. Rather, he watched as she began to march away, shaking her head. Conscious that her car was all the way on the opposite side of the garage, he gave her an intense gaze that demanded she stop.
“Yes?”
“You’re trying to cut me out?”
“What do you mean?” The way she said it reminded Fruchtman of her limitations as an actress.
“I can call him and put a stop to this. I’ve known him for twenty years almost.”
“Did you have an abortion for him?” She paused, letting that sink in.
“Claire, I want for us to be together. I love you. I am getting a divorce. You just have to be patient.”
Her eyes were full of hate. He could see that she knew that he was lying, and she waited a moment before speaking again. Her sense of control and authority was frightening. As much as anything else, it astonished him in that he had not suspected it in her. He had thought she was a mouse. “You don’t believe me?”
She indicated her lack of faith by staring at him. Her body was still. She did not need to shake her head. Instead, she smiled, silently.
“Fine. But I’m not going to let you screw me out of this credit. Or the money.”
The light in the underground garage was shadowy, and she was standing at least ten feet away from him. Yet he could see the not-quite-concealed quality of pleasure in her face when she responded. “I want you to work on this, Mike. I’m grateful for what you’ve done for me. We’ll talk.”
“Can I stop by your place? How’s later today?”
Her face expressed the impossibility of the notion.
“Well, what about tomorrow?”
She nodded vaguely and then began searching for her car keys in her bag. “The next few days might be tricky, but obviously we’ll be in touch.”
