THE ARMENIAN RESTAURANT ON PICO Boulevard had the atmosphere of a Jewish delicatessen, a menu featuring food so delicious that it would inspire a condemned man to smile through his last meal, and more plainclothes cops and film-industry types together in one place than you would find anywhere outside of the courtroom devoted to the trial of the latest spouse-murdering celebrity.
When Ethan arrived, Hazard Yancy waited in a booth by a window. Even seated, he loomed so large that he would have been well advised to audition for the title role in The Incredible Hulk if Hollywood ever made a black version.
Hazard had already been served a double order of the kibby appetizer with cucumbers, tomatoes, and pickled turnip on the side.
As Ethan sat across the table from the big detective, Hazard said, “Somebody told me they saw in the news your boss got twenty-seven million bucks for his last two movies.”
“Twenty-seven million each. He’s the first to break through the twenty-five-million ceiling.”
“Up from poverty,” Hazard said.
“Plus he’s got a piece of the back end.”
[58] “That kind of money, he can get a piece of anybody’s back end he wants.”
“It’s an industry phrase. Means if the picture is a big hit, he gets a share of the profits, sometimes even a percentage of gross.”
“How much might that amount to?”
“According to Daily Variety, he’s had worldwide hits so big he sometimes walks away with fifty million, thereabouts.”
“You read the show-biz press now?” Hazard asked.
“Helps me stay aware of how big a target he’s making himself.”
“You got your work cut out for you, all right. How many movies does the man do a year?”
“Never fewer than two. Sometimes three.”
“I was planning to chow down so much on his dime, Mr. Charming Manheim himself would notice, and you’d get fired for abusing your credit-card privileges.”
“Even you can’t eat a hundred thousand bucks’ worth of kibby.”
Hazard shook his head. “Chan the Man. Maybe I’m not hip anymore, but I don’t see him being fifty million cool.”
“He also owns a TV-production company with three shows currently on major networks, four on cable. He pulls in a few million a year from Japan, doing TV commercials for their top-selling beer. He has a line of sports clothes. Lots more. His agents call the nonacting income ‘additional revenue streams.’ ”
“People just pissing money on him, huh?”
“He’ll never need to shop for bargains.”
When the waitress came to the table, Ethan ordered Moroccan salmon with couscous, and iced tea.
Taking Hazard’s order, she wore the point off her pencil: lebne with string cheese and extra cucumbers, hummus, stuffed grape leaves, lahmajoon flatbread, seafood tagine. ... “Plus give me two of those little bottles of Orangina.”
“Only person I ever saw eat that much,” Ethan said, “was this bulimic ballerina. She went to the John to puke after every course.”
[59] “I’m just sampling, and I never wear a tutu.” Hazard cut his last kibby in two. “So how big an asshole, is Chan the Man?”
The masking roar of other lunchtime conversations provided Ethan and Hazard with privacy nearly equal to that on a remote Mojave hill.
“It’s impossible to hate him,” Ethan said.
“That’s your best compliment?”
“It’s just that in person he doesn’t have the impact he does on the screen. He doesn’t stir your emotions one way or the other.”
Hazard forked half a kibby into his mouth and made a small sound of pleasure. “So he’s all image, no substance.”
“That’s not quite it. He’s so ... bland. Generous to employees. Not arrogant. But there’s this ... this weightlessness about him. He’s sort of careless how he treats people, even his own son, but it’s a benign indifference. He’s not an actively bad guy.”
“That money, that much adoration, you expect a monster.”
“With him, you don’t get it. You get ...”
Ethan paused to think. In the months he’d worked for Manheim, he had not spoken this much or this frankly about the man to anyone.
He and Hazard had been shot at together, and each had trusted his life to the other. He could speak his mind and know that nothing he said would be repeated.
With such a confidential sounding board, he wanted to describe the Face not only as honestly as possible but as perceptively. In explaining Manheim to Hazard, he also might be able more fully to explain the actor to himself.
After the waitress brought iced tea and the Oranginas, Ethan at last said, “He’s self-absorbed but not in the usual movie-star way, not in any way that makes him appear egotistical. He cares about the money, I guess, but I don’t think he cares what anyone thinks of him or that he’s famous. He’s self-absorbed, all right, totally self-absorbed, but it’s like this ... this Zen state of self-absorption.”
[60] “Zen state?”
“Yeah. Like life is about him and nature, him and the cosmos, not him and other people. He always seems to be half in a meditative state, not entirely here with you, like some con-man yogi pretending to be otherworldly, except he’s sincere. If he’s always contemplating the universe, then he’s also confident the universe is contemplating him, that their fascination is mutual.”
Having finished the last of his kibby, Hazard said, “Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Bogart—were they all airheads, and nobody knew it, or in those days were movie stars real men with their feet on the ground?”
“Some real people are still in the business. I met Jodie Foster, Sandra Bullock. They seem real.”
“They seem like they could kick ass, too,” Hazard said.
Two waitresses were required to bring all the food to the table.
Hazard grinned and nodded as each dish was placed before him: “Nice. Nice. That’s nice. Real nice. Oh, very nice.”
The memory of being shot in the gut spoiled Ethan’s appetite. As he picked at his Moroccan salmon and couscous, he delayed bringing up the issue of Rolf Reynerd. “So you said you’ve got one foot on some snot-wad’s neck. What’s the case?”
“Twenty-two-year-old blond cutie strangled, dumped in a sewage-treatment slough. We call it Blonde in the Pond.”
Any cop who works homicides is changed forever by his job. The victims haunt him with the quiet insistence of spirochetes spinning poison in the blood.
Humor is your best and often only defense against the horror. Early in the investigation, every killing is given a droll name, which is thereafter used within the Homicide Division.
Your ranking officer would never ask, Are you making progress on the Ermitrude Pottlesby murder? It would always be, Anything new with Blonde in the Pond?
When Ethan and Hazard worked the brutal murders of two [61] lesbians of Middle Eastern descent, the c............