Hollywood Sinners

34

Los Angeles



Cole Steel’s agent poured his sixth coffee of the day and lost count of the number of sugars he put in it. It had been a shitty morning at his downtown office: he’d spent most of it in talks with aggressive publicists, and on top of that the air-conditioning was out.

Marty King dialled his secretary. ‘Jennifer, can we get this thing fixed? I’m sweating like a goddamn pig in here.’ He replaced the receiver and mopped his brow with a silk polka-dot handkerchief.

Marty’s office was an exercise in minimalism–a large white space sliced through with black leather and chrome. Back in the seventies when he had first started up, he had employed a then-little-known Norwegian designer to draw up the plans. It was still, in Marty’s view, the most stylish office in town. Outside, the emerald tops of palm trees rustled in the breeze of a pure-blue LA sky. It reminded him of a David Hockney painting.

Marty took a slug of coffee and it scalded his throat. He felt unbearably hot–and it wasn’t just down to the air-con. It was his client Cole Steel’s arrangement with Lana Falcon: the whole thing was enough to give him a coronary. The finer points of the deal had been complicated enough to begin with, but now Cole wanted to extend the contract and not only did that mean dealing with supreme hard-ass Rita Clay–it also meant coming up with a drastic plan of action. Instinct told him that Cole’s current wife wasn’t going to be all that easy to hold on to.

And then, yesterday, he had hit on the answer.

It was the only way.

But, boy, was it making him sweat.

In all his years in the business, Marty had never before been prepared to take such a risk. The solution he’d come up with made him question his whole moral fibre, something he consistently tried to avoid. Could he really go through with it? Moves like the one he was planning weren’t the reason he’d got into this game.

And he felt sorry for Lana–she was a smart girl, a talented girl, but she’d had no real idea what she was letting herself into when she’d signed with Cole. Marty knew his client was a difficult man but they went back a long way: these days he could anticipate Cole’s next move before he knew it himself. He had already been anticipating the renewal request. If Lana was able to do the same, she might have stood a chance–for when Cole made up his mind about something, it was as good as done.

If only his client could get his damn prick up! It’d make Marty’s life a hell of a lot easier.

He knocked back the rest of his coffee and checked his watch. It was four o’clock. Loosening his tie, he prepared for the long night ahead. If Cole Steel wanted to stay married, then that was exactly what was going to happen.

‘Are you Jimmy Hart?’

Across town, Jimmy looked up from beneath the rim of his baseball cap, a sticky array of empty shot glasses on the bar before him. The sudden movement made him feel decidedly woozy. He resolved to determine how pretty she was before answering the question, which was difficult to gauge when the room was swimming. Catching his reflection in a mirror on the opposite wall, he groaned. It was a good disguise at least: gone was the award-winning comedy movie star and in his place some bum drunk with three-day stubble and shadows round his eyes.

He’d been at Joey’s since three, a dimly lit bar off Wilshire that stocked an apparently endless supply of whisky, after yet another argument with his wife. The owner was a jocular Italian who either didn’t recognise Jimmy in his customary combats and cap, or politely pretended not to.

‘What’s it to you?’ he asked the woman, registering long dark hair, too frizzy, and clumpy eye make-up. She wasn’t bad, nice and tall, but today he just couldn’t be bothered. Women were cut from an identical mould – they were all chasing the same things: fame, money and the glory that came with bedding a movie star. Except for Kate–these days all she wanted was his dick on a stick.

‘I’m such a fan,’ she said in an artificial sing-song, slipping uninvited on to the adjacent bar stool. He noticed she was wearing cheap fishnet stockings that were torn over the knee. Maybe she was a hooker.

‘Yeah, well, you’ve got the wrong guy.’ He gestured for a refill.

‘I don’t think so …’ She reached for his leg but he swatted her hand away, vaguely pleased that the alcohol hadn’t deadened his reflexes. Somewhere amid the weak layers of temptation he must have an inbuilt anti-skank mechanism.

She watched him quizzically for a moment before raising a hand and giving him the finger. Her hands were massive.

‘F*ck you, bozo,’ she said gruffly, her voice dropping by an octave.

Glad to have been spared the attention, Jimmy downed another. It wasn’t helping, but tonight he just wanted to forget. And yet the more he drank the more thoughts of Kate wrung him out, like water being squeezed from a sponge. The marriage was in freefall. Since he had last tried to have sex with his wife, communication had all but broken down–the only time they talked to each other was when it concerned the children.

Jimmy put his head in his hands when he thought of the kids–it was because of them that he felt like a real bastard. But what could he do? When he had met Kate she had been a different person. And so, he supposed, had he. Everyone expected a comedian to be a self-loathing arsehole. Why disappoint?

Something buzzed in his pocket. It took a second to realise it was his phone. Had just saved him from liver failure, probably.

It was his agent. Great timing. He was tempted to stuff it back in his pocket but some faint intuition told him to pick it up.

‘Brock, hi.’ He tried to focus-drunk comics were such a cliché.

‘You’re drunk,’ said Brock.

‘I’m not.’ Jimmy nodded as the barman refuelled his glass.

‘Where are you?’ Brock asked suspiciously.

‘At home.’

‘Aha! I just called you there and no answer.’

‘I was taking a dump. What’s this about, Brock?’

‘You’ve got a casting next week.’

Jimmy was confused. ‘Have I?’ It had been ages since he’d been called for anything. His last film was a terrible commercial effort in which he’d had to gussy up as a range of overweight characters, hilarious, of course, because he was naturally so thin. It had bombed–fat wasn’t funny–and now Jimmy had all but given up on an opportunity to redeem himself. He’d been humiliated.

‘I’ll send over the script,’ said Brock.

‘As long as I don’t have to eat fifty chilli dogs or whatever.’

‘No chilli dogs. Or doughnuts.’

‘Fine.’

‘And remember Harriet Foley’s party on Friday. You should go–she likes you.’ Harriet Foley was the quite terrifying US editor of major fashion magazine In. She was extraordinarily well connected.

‘I’ll be there.’

‘Good. I’m bringing Chloe French,’ said Brock, loudly chewing gum. ‘I thought you two might get on–y’know, the Brit thing.’

Jimmy remembered seeing her at the Romans’ wedding. Young, arresting, with all that wonderful hair.

‘I gotta go, Brock. I’ll call about the script.’

‘You got it.’ Then, before he hung up: ‘And, Jimmy?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Go home.’

Jimmy closed his phone, downed the final shot and put a fifty on the bar. He could feel the rot of depression sinking in and told himself to climb up out of it.

Something needed to happen. Something good. Something, he decided, called Chloe French.