Date: Sat, 30 May 1998 18:37:43 -0700 From: "J. Hall" Subject: Re: [WRITERS] INT: Goldman Pictures, The Groom Wore Soy Sauce.. > "I'd prefer not to. My question is, what in the hell is >existentialism?" > Reine laughed, "So you'll do it?" > I geared the Crosley down, slowing through the hairpins of the back Cany On and wondered if the brakes would make it to the Texaco station on Ventura Boulevard, let alone a desert run on 66 to Vegas. We nearly didn't make it to the next stop sign. A passing LA County Sheriff's cruiser nearly turned us both into a coyote's lunch, wailing around and passing on the left before sliding to a halt at the entrance to a hillside home below that was lit up like a Marshall Field's Christmas window. "You know who lives down there?" I asked. Three or four dark sedans were lined up outside a Bauhaus looking collection of boxes, pools and floodlit cacti propped on stilts overlooking Universal City. I checked for floating bodies in the main pool as we passed but only saw a beach ball bobbing over a lucent green. Even rich people had them. I added that to my encyclopedia of detective knowledge. "You're changing the subject." She'd asked me again about marrying in Las Vegas. I'd never heard the word love come up once. Not from me. Not from her. "If that sheriff had been any closer I'd be changing something else," I grinned. "Besides, that's William Holden's place." I slowed the car, nearly standing on the brake and we crawled by a Deputy standing in Holden's driveway. He may have said something like "move along" but Reinie or Nora or whoever she was that moment turned and flipped on the radio angrily, a blast of trombones erupting inside the little car. My ears went dead for a moment. I turned it off. The subsequent silence was even louder and I pulled over on the next turnout and killed the lights. "Look," I said, "this is nuts." She nodded and pawed through a little black purse, staring at the passing cars on the Ventura. The waltz I'd been living with had dwindled to a dismal drum solo I waited for the gun, but instead she flipped open a box of Shermans and lit one. "I didn't know you smoked," I said. "There are a lot of things you don't know," she said quietly. "About me, about anything." I had to agree. Marlowe and I once shared a bottle of scotch in the apartment of a dead choreographer who we'd been hired to protect from an obsessed dishwasher. Neither of us had forseen him dressing up as a chorus girl to murder her with a solid silver stiletto heel. He'd said more or less the same thing then, only it had been laced with a side order of profanity. I wished I had the bottle, Marlowe and the dishwasher all in the back seat. All were lethal enough, if taken the wrong way. So was Reinie. "Well I know one thing," I said unhappily. "This crate won't get anyone to Vegas." If anyone ever wrote this case up as a story it would be filed under B for Bewildered. 48 hours after meeting her at Goldman and nearly being ventilated by Tony DeLauro, who just happened to be her uncle, who she was more than a little eager to see back in Joliet, I was having to justify why I couldn't marry her in Vegas. A fake marriage no less. She drummed her fingernails on the door as I pulled the Crosley into a nondescript service station just off the Ventura Freeway. The hills above us were spattered with yellow lights, the homes of the beautiful awake in the early evening with martinis and mayhem. The cops had turned off their flashers at Holdens. I wondered what had happened. "You aren't listening," she gritted. "I know," I said. She'd been talking for the last few minutes but my mind had been elsewhere, riding the rollercoasters of possiblities. Marry her? I couldn't remember the last time I'd even had a real date. She cozied over a little, the silk of her dress whispering to me. "If you marry me Uncle Tony can't kill you," Reinie lilted. "Sure he can. He'd feel just awful about it for maybe five seconds then as soon as he realized you were just using me to get to him he'd get over it." If a woman could bristle, Reinie bristled. Her voice frosted over like the sides of a mai tai at the Del Rey yacht club. "Is that what you think? Really think?" I started to say yes but she went on. "Some goddamn detective you are. What was that up there? Do you think I just jump in the sack with anybody who buys me dinner?" I let her vent for a while and watched the night attendant inside the garage office, a young Mexican boy in a white shirt and tie, staring at us, probably deliberating whether to leave Young Widder Brown in mid program or go out and see what the crazy gringos in the little mouse-car wanted. She wound down. "You're even more beautiful when you're angry, sweetheart," I laughed, hoping she was through. "But there are two major problems with this whole Vegas scheme of yours." Her eyebrows went up together. One came down and she pointed the other one at me like a cannon. "And what, if I may be so bold, would they be?" You could have cut tomato cans open on her voice. "The first is that technically speaking, I'm still married. Besides fraud, racketeering and money laundering, not to mention running an illegal house of gambling and tax evasion-" I held up my hand to stop her from interrupting. "-which I would become part of, should you somehow manage to get Tony incarcerated, I'd be guilty of Bigamy. I've broken a few laws before, Reinie-" "Nora." "Ok Nora, I've busted laws, bent them, painted over them with sixteen coats of lacquer and buff-waxed them to a perfect shine but this would be a new record. And all in one night?" I flipped a Lucky between my lips since she'd gone through three Shermans and showed no signs of stopping any time soon. "I walk a fine line, sugar," I explained, trying not to look at her legs. She had a perfect pair, and they were deeply tanned, with a light dusting of freckles. I could still taste them. "The cops don't much care for me but they tolerate my business. I do the kind of work they won't touch, or can't touch and once in a very great while a little justice gets done. If they even suspected I was mixed up with the likes of Tony DeLauro or you my license would evaporate so fast the ink on my photo might spontaneously combust." She trailed a fingernail down my jaw. "I thought you said you were divorced," she purred. "It's not final," I sighed. Moonlight caught a glimmer of her throat and rode it downtown to the happy valley between her breasts as she leaned over. Carole Lombard would be proud of that dress, what of it there was. "Liar," she grinned, kissing my ear. "She's suing me for custody of the cat." Reinie burst out laughing right in my ear and I could feel her whole body shaking. Hell, the whole Crosley was shaking. I needed new shocks. Maybe we were having an earthquake. The Mexican boy gave up staring at us through the window and walked into the back. Gringos were boring compared to Inner Sanctum and a stack of car batteries that needed pricing. "Vegas will wait," I said. "We have a much more urgent problem." She laid her head on my shoulder and put a hand under my coat. "What's that?" I got to the gun before she did. "We have company," I said and she lifted up to stare through the windshield at what I was pointing at. A long black Lincoln had pulled up under a streetlamp not fifty yards away. "Tony's here," I said. I heard her gulp over the slam of the Lincoln's four heavy doors. The hammer on my .38 went back and I ground the engine hard. "I wonder how he knew," I said woodenly, risking a quick look at her eyes before I floored the accelerator heading straight for Blue-eye. "It wasn't me, I swear it, Jeff," she said, her eyes wide as we rocketed toward the slowly lowering shotgun barrels. For a moment, I almost believed her. to be continued...