Bogart Sleeps Here: A Trace Novella (Chapter Two)

Lisa disentangled her long legs from the crisp brown sheets and answered the hotel phone with a groan and a yawn for a greeting.

“Did I wake you?” Trace knew it was a stupid question before he asked. Six nights a week, Lisa was the featured attraction at The Blue Orchid, a popular blues and jazz club in the Wilshire Corridor. She normally didn’t leave The Blue Orchid until two-thirty in the morning. Last night, like most Sunday nights, Lisa spent the long twilight hours after work unwinding in Trace’s Extended Stays suite at the Glendale Days Inn.

“Mmmmm, you didn’t wake me,” Lisa hummed into the phone. “I was just laying here, enjoying your scent on the pillow. When’re you coming home?”

“Not for a while,” Trace said. He was navigating the Packard over Barham Boulevard to the Cahuenga Pass. The soft, dark shoulder of Universal Studios loomed to his right when he stopped at the traffic light. “I have a meeting with Jack Smalls and Gray Hubler at the Formosa at three.”

“Didn’t you say those guys were losers?”

“They might have access to money. Listen, I need you to me a big favor, hon. Go on the internet and find everything you can on David Dulce and — ”

“David Dulce?” Lisa yawned again. “The guy who sued Lee Vine for palimony?”

“That’s him. Print me out a big research packet on him, will you? I may have a huge score here but I have to know a little more about the guy first – other than the fact that he’s a creepy old fag.”

“Trace — ” Lisa admonished.

Trace quickly changed the subject. “I also have some bad news about my stalker. She has Borderline Personality Disorder and she once threatened to kill her own kid.”

“And she knows your address. You need to move, Trace.”

He was losing the cell phone signal as he made the left hand turn from Barham onto Cahuenga.

“Can you leave the research on my desk so I can look at it when I get home tonight?”

“Will I see you at the club?”

“Probably not. I have too much to work on and I’m in the middle of a Dan Knight story.”

The signal faded and then died. Trace holstered the phone and folded both fists around the steering wheel as Cahuenga Boulevard took a sharp dip and the Hollywood Bowl came into view.

*****

Trace could smell the desperation on the two men when he walked into the Formosa Cafe. A vaporous cloud of wretched hopelessness hung over their table, the detritus of their failed careers taking the form of a black storm front that threatened to explode with violent fury at any moment.

If I can see it, Trace thought, certainly their investors can see it, as well as their wives, friends, and their associates in the low-budget film community. Their children can see it. Their bill collectors can sense it. Even their pets probably shied away from them for fear of that loathsome smell wafting from their human frames.

Trace waved to Jack Smalls, sitting to the left of Gray Hubler in the plush red booth. Trace had known Jack Smalls for twenty-seven years. They met when Trace was a fledgling screenwriter and Jack was director of development for a production company financed wholly by the Church Of Scientology. Over the years Jack had been a post production supervisor, an assistant director, and a producer of indie films, nothing that really shook out to resemble a remarkable or consistent career. Jack was nearing his sixtieth year of his life. He owed $100,000 in credit card debt and he was in an almost feral panic.

Trace knew next to nothing about Gray Hubler except for the basic facts: He was a camera operator for “Gunsmoke” in the 60s and then he gravitated toward the low-
budget indie market, slaving as director of photography on over 200 instantly forgettable pieces of schlock with laughable titles like “Mistress Dracula’s Blood Orgy”.

“That was back in the days when we had drive-ins to take our product,” Gray had explained to Trace when they first met a week prior. “Today all of the low-budget stuff is direct to video. I was in Blockbuster the other day and saw five of my old movies on the shelves, still renting after all this time.”

Somehow Smalls and Hubler had parasitically attached themselves to “a group of Beverly Hills investors” who wanted to invest in a package of $300,000 horror films.

“It’s real money,” Jack told Trace.

Trace was three weeks behind on his rent at the hotel and the David Dulce deal wouldn’t convert to a payday for at least another month once he set the gears in motion. Smalls and Hubler were offering him $500 against $7,500 for a horror screenplay that they could deliver to their investors for a green light. First, however, Trace had to write a treatment – a concise synopsis of the story and all of its dramatic beats – before they could approve the concept and send him away with a check for $500 in his briefcase and a momentary reprieve from the wolves howling at the door.

Hubler was leaning heavily toward a concept of his own.

“A vampire story set in a concentration camp,” Hubler suggested to Trace. “That way we get two horror elements in one: the vampire and the horror of the concentration camp.”

Smalls nodded his head in eager agreement. He always deferred to Hubler.

“So, you’re thinking ‘Stalag 17’ meets ‘Dracula’?” Trace offered.

“Exactly! But with less of the humor of ‘Stalag 17’.” Hubler beamed and turned to Smalls. “You’re right. This guy’s good.”

Trace wanted to crawl under the table but as long as that $500 lure was in front of him he was going to stay put.

“A writer for hire never walks away from a job prospect until the money fails to materialize,” Trace had once explained to Lisa.

Jack Smalls took a long swallow of his iced tea and leaned forward excitedly.

“This is really great because the victims of the vampire can be the camp guards. The audience will be all – ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ – to see them get killed.”

There were practical reasons that Hubler and Smalls were sold on ‘Stalag Dracula’, Trace was told. Hubler had access to an affordable location, an abandoned camp for wayward youth on the outskirts of the Mojave Desert. Further, Hubler’s biggest box office smashes had been sex and blood-soaked vampire tales.

This means that Hubler is riding his own coattails, Trace calculated, banking on his past successes to compel those Beverly Hills investors to scribble out a check for three hundred grand. It didn’t feel right. It never did with guys like this. It suddenly struck Trace as funny that the hustle and con of the low-budget horror market seemed to be a man’s game. One rarely met women down this dark alley in the slums of the film industry. Women seem to have more sense than to dick around with a waste of film that was only going to net them a few grand in the long run. Give a woman a shot at producing a motion picture and she wants to make the next “Terms of Endearment”, not “Stalag Dracula”.

“So, five hundred against seventy-five hundred for the screenplay once we approve the treatment.” Hubler repeated the terms of the agreement. “Does that sound amenable to you, Trace?”

It was four o’clock. The famous restaurant and bar on Santa Monica Boulevard, with its dark interior and noir flourishes spilling over everything like hard lacquered memories refusing to die, was barely breathing. The doe-eyed bartender had nothing to do but wash and stack dishes. An elderly couple sat close to one another in a corner booth and mutely grazed on Cobb salads. Trace guessed that they had been patrons since the 40s or 50s when the dive played host to the likes of Bogart and Errol Flynn and Lana Turner and Johnny Stompanato.

“It sounds fine.” Trace tried to muster some enthusiasm in his voice. He came to the meeting hoping they would be willing to pony up at least a small stipend before he began work. “I can probably get started tonight.”