Bogart Sleeps Here: A Trace Novella (Chapter Four)

Dan Knight’s Hollywood bungalow is as dark and spartan as a monk’s cell. The tightly-shuttered Venetian blinds refuse to allow any ration of morning sunshine to invade the room. There is a simple mattress on the floor for bedding. Upturned cardboard boxes for night stands.

Dan lays on his side on the mattress, both hands clenched into tight fists as if he is trying to physically fight back against the image of the dead girl floating in his mind’s eye.

He rises from the mattress on unsteady legs, opens the blinds and harsh morning light slices in.

In the bathroom mirror, Dan stares at his reflection. He doesn’t like what he sees staring back at him.

Dan lathers his spectral face with shaving cream, careless about the effort, shaving is just a dull ritual anymore. Unsteady hands pick up a razor from the cracked porcelain sink, an old-fashioned Schick with disposable blades. He opens the blade lock and studies it meaningfully.

There are two possible courses of action here: he can shave the stubble from his lousy face and move on with his day or he can take the sharp edges of that razor blade and —

— a glance at the alarm clock on the back of the toilet presents the solution. It is 8:00 AM straight up. Quickly, he begins to shave as he realizes that he is late for his appointment.

This is L.A., where even suicidal depressives have to balance their desire for death against a busy social calendar.

*****

6:00 AM.

Like any day that began at such an ungodly hour, Trace felt like someone dropped a truck load of microwave ovens on his head. It wasn’t so much that he was hung over. He wasn’t. He’d only had four glasses of pinot noir and a couple of shots of vodka the night before. The fact of the matter was that his body was beginning to rebel from decades of abuse and maltreatment. No longer could he bounce back in a snappy manner from a bout of debauchery the night before.

He sat up on the edge of the bed, expelled his lungs achingly, and staggered to the shower with a cigarette parked in the corner of his mouth. He had a $100 poem to write before his 11:00 AM with David Hovic at Warners.

After a less than invigorating shower he boiled tap water in the microwave, momentarily feeling penitent about not having gone to see Lisa at the Blue Orchid the night before, while he dumped Folgers Instant, powdered creamer, and two packets of sugar into the scalding hot coffee mug.

“A poem,” Trace hissed, coffee mug in hand as he haltingly walked to the balcony. His cold blue eyes fixed on the skyscrapers that jutted out of the earth and into the gray, sodium-flavored sky.

Trace had good reason to be intimidated by the prospect of writing a poem. The only poet he liked was Robert Service. The only thing he understood about the mechanics of poetry was iambic pentameter. Poetry was an alien language to him.

But one hundred bucks was one hundred bucks.

He played with words and themes for hours. He parked words on paper and moved them around this way and that but nothing that spat out of his brain resembled poetry. He refused to read poems for inspiration because if he was going to compose one of the goddamn things it would be on his own terms.

Two hours before his meeting with Hovic he took the Packard out for a drive. He drove south on Glendale Boulevard and soon found himself passing through the gates of Forest Lawn Memorial Park. The cemetery historian once told Trace that theirs were the largest wrought-iron gates in the world. Forest Lawn was founded in 1917 by Dr. Hubert Eaton, a firm believer in a gleeful life after death. Eaton thought that most cemeteries were “unsightly, depressing stoneyards.” He vowed to create a cemetery that was “as unlike other cemeteries as sunshine is unlike darkness.” Eaton wanted Forest Lawn to be “a great park devoid of misshapen monuments and other signs of earthly death, but filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, beautiful statuary, and memorial architecture.”

“Forest Lawn is about the denial of death,” Trace wrote in an article for Historic Preservationist Magazine. “It is a living monument to the testament of faith that even a clever Mormon stonemason could never outdo.”

A security guard gave Trace the once-over as he climbed out of the Packard in the empty parking lot.

“No picture taking,” the guard cautioned Trace.

“Do I look like a goddamn tourist?” he grumbled.

Trace lit a slim cigar after the guard passed and, hands thrust deep in his trouser pockets, began strolling the lush cemetery grounds with the casual ease of a walk in the park.

“Among the dead,” he said to himself and smiled. It was the title of one of his favorite novels.

He came upon a locked area that was not accessible to the public. There were grave markers inside the secure compound and when his weary eyes rested upon one particular pale green marker he knew he had his poem. He pulled a wirebound memo notebook from his coat pocket and leaned against a headstone as he wrote the five simple lines:

Bogart Sleeps Here
Born on Christmas Day in 1899
Died on January 14, two years before I was born
His middle name was DeForest
The vase next to his headstone holds no flowers

*****

“It’s ‘Moby Dick’ with cops and robbers,” Trace insisted.

Hovic leaned his bony elbows on the desk top and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He was one of the youngest development executives in the movie business, rising from script analyst to administrative assistant to junior exec in less than a year and a half.
“Has there ever been a good movie made from ‘Moby Dick’?” Hovic mused.

“The John Huston version wasn’t bad.” Trace tossed back a long swallow from the 20 ounce bottle of Aquafina in his quaking hands and screwed the cap back on before tossing it in the canvas bag at his feet. He was wearing neatly-pressed black slacks, a navy blue dress shirt, and a charcoal gray sports jacket. The 9mm was in the bag at his feet, tucked in among the reams of research on David Dulce.

“Never saw the Huston one. I watched the TV movie with what’s-his-name, though.”

“Patrick Stewart,” Trace muttered. “I’ll take Gregory Peck any day. But back to the script.”

“Yes, please, back to the script.”

Trace squirmed fitfully in the luxurious armchair at the side of Hovic’s desk. Cheeky little bastard, he thought, 23-years old and he owns office furniture that’s worth more than I’ll ever have in the bank this year.

“It’s the story of this female FBI agent whose sterling career is cut short when she encounters a notorious bank robber, attempts to perform an arrest, and he blows her leg off with a shotgun. That’s the beginning of the movie. From there we cut to three years later and the woman has become a psychotic mess as a result of losing her job with the Bureau and she begins this crazed cross-country journey to find and kill the man responsible for ruining her life. And one more thing: because of losing her leg and all she’s constantly on heavy duty painkillers, so she’s a drugged-out psychopath with an expert marksmanship certificate from the FBI on an obsessive quest to seek revenge. See? It’s just ‘Moby Dick’ with cops and robbers, like I said.”

Hovic sighed. “It’s not a bad idea, per se, Trace, but there’s the literary pedigree to consider.”

“What literary pedigree?” It took all of his self-control to prevent the words from leaping out as a bark and growl.

“You said ‘Moby Dick’ with cops and robbers.”

Now he did bark. “That was the pitch, Hovic! I didn’t mean it too literally.”

Hovic shook his head. “It’s still going to be hard to get around with the brass. Everyone sees ‘Moby Dick’ as a boring book. It’s a joke on that level.”

“Have you ever read it?” Trace growled. “It’s actually quite good. But I only used it for the pitch. You know, the hybrid. You guys like to hear that a script is a cross between this and that. The script isn’t literally ‘Moby Dick’.”

“But it is ‘Moby Dick’,” Hovic persisted.

“No, I just use the paradigm of ‘Moby Dick’ to tell the story. The chick is Ahab, the guy she’s chasing is the big white whale, and the cops pursuing her sort of fill out collectively the role of Ishmael. They are the survivors, the ones who live to tell the story.”

“Everyone is going to recognize the story as ‘Moby Dick’ with cops and robbers, Trace, and they’ll shy away from it.”

“Why?” Trace pleaded.

“Because it’s Moby-Fucking-Dick!”

“It is not.” Trace set his jaw in a defiant pose.

Hovic withdrew a long breath that sounded like a balloon slowly losing its helium.

“Trace,” he said in a measured tone, “you pitched it to me as ‘Moby Dick’ with cops and robbers.”

Hovic extracted a weighty hardback novel from a desk drawer and dropped it on the desk. It made a thud that echoed off the walls.

That’s not a book, Trace thought, it’s a cruel instrument for upper body conditioning.

“Ever read that?” Hovic asked.

Trace glanced at the dust jacket. “’Losing Light’? Can’t say as I have. It looks like the author could’ve used an editor, though..”

A mean glint came into Hovic’s eyes. “It’s been on the New York Times Bestseller List for five weeks running. We paid a million and a half for the rights. We haven’t secured a writer yet. The story is set in the porn industry and since you worked in the–”

Trace rolled his eyes.

“Don’t be so goddamn insolent, Trace. I’m trying to do you a favor here. I cannot consider you to adapt the book because you’re not on the list of name writers in the business but I am willing to pay you to give me a complete breakdown of the book.”

“You want me to be an analyst?”

“More than that, I want your expert opinion on the setting and the plot and characters. Is it a realistic depiction of the adult film and magazine industry? Does it tell us anything that ‘Boogie Nights’ didn’t already say?”

“Sounds like questions you should’ve asked before you shelled out a million and a half for the rights.”

Hovic ignored him. “You have to admit it’s a fascinating subject, Trace. Porn has seeped into the culture of modern youth. Sex and sexuality is de rigueur for kids today. Girls are giving blow jobs by the time they’re twelve years old. Did you know that?”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t have such predilections.” He smiled to make it appear as if the comment was a joke.

“Five thousand dollars upon completion,” Hovic offered.

Trace scooped the book off the desk and studied the dust jacket.

“It’s a catchy title,” he said.