Robert Ferrigno - Scavenger hunt

"Sugar?"

Sugar sat in an aluminum chaise longue, wearing baggy blue swim trunks, his bulky torso slathered in oil. The girl in the polka-dot bikini was rolling over. Sugar watched her try to cover her breasts with an arm as she reached for her top. She wasn't completely successful, and he saw a flash of white skin, soft white skin that had never felt the sun. Still, he appreciated her efforts to maintain a semblance of modesty-so many of the young ones were whores. Pardon his language, but there was just no other word for it.

"We have to do something."

"I don't have to do anything." Sugar moved the phone to his other ear. "I see a sleeping dog, I let him lie there."

"I don't think that's wise."

"You don't, huh?" One of the gulls floated over the three girls and their French fries, squawking-if they weren't careful, they were going to have an unwanted visitor. Girls should know better, particularly the pretty ones. They were just asking for trouble. Sugar reached into the cooler beside his chaise longue, pulled out a bottle of organic apple juice, and took a long drink. He smacked his lips into the receiver. "Well, you know your business, I know mine."

"I want you to take a more proactive approach."

One of the other girls shifted on her beach towel, and Sugar watched the taut rise of her hip, the sweetness of her shadow. If he had had his binoculars, he could have counted the sweat beads on her inner thighs. He pinched his own belly, got a handful of fat, then smoothed his warm oiled skin. Not bad. "Proactive-that's a word you don't hear in conversation very often, and every time you do, it's an asswipe who's using it."

"God damn it, Rollo, you should have told me," said Jimmy.

"B.K. is cool," said Rollo. "Relax, man. Get yourself a colonic."

Jimmy glared at him, then went back to watching the sun-baked road, heat shimmering off the blacktop. He was driving this time, not trusting Rollo's old VW van to make the steep grade up to Walsh's trailer, the black Saab whipping around the curves spewing gravel as Jimmy blinked back sweat. Walsh was going to go nuts when someone he didn't know showed up. Jimmy just hoped they got there before Rollo's new buddy.

The afternoon was hot and dry and overcast, the twelfth straight day of a thermal inversion. A shroud of pollution hovered over the L.A. basin, getting progressively thicker and more carcinogenic. Jimmy's throat was raw, and he had a headache that all the aspirin in the world didn't help. He wasn't alone. The violent-crime index had gone up seventeen percent since the smog alert had been declared, and the continuing power crisis made the use of air-conditioners problematic. Yesterday two women driving nearly identical minivans had gotten into an argument over a parking space outside a grocery store, an argument that ended with one woman beating in the other's windshield with a metal baseball bat. The bat was handy, since she was taking her daughter's T-ball team to practice. As the Channel Five news anchor intoned smugly last night, "Southern Californians now have to choose between life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness." Jimmy had wanted to shoot the set.

It had been a month since the scavenger hunt. Rollo and the twins' triumphant arrival at the party bearing Walsh's directing Oscar had been the highlight of the evening. Rollo had called Jimmy, giddy, said Napitano was feeding the twins beluga caviar from his open mouth like a mother bird with her chicks. Jimmy had thanked him for the charming image. Walsh had clutched Jimmy's arm when Rollo's van pulled up an hour later, still pleading for Jimmy to tell his story, finally surrendering, promising to have the script finished in a month. "Then maybe you'll believe me."

Jimmy didn't argue; he left Walsh to stew in that broken-backed trailer, hearing him pounding away on the swapmeet typewriter, just beating away on it. Jimmy didn't feel sorry for him, not exactly; but Jimmy wished he hadn't hit him.

Walsh had stuck his head out the window as Jimmy and Rollo got into the van. "Come back in a month, and I'll barbecue some steaks. You bring the steaks-New York cut, two inches thick minimum- and a bag of mesquite charcoal and a few cases of cold Heineken. A couple of Marie Callender Dutch apple pies would be nice too, and a gallon of French vanilla. Don't forget the charcoal lighter. I'll supply the match," Walsh said, dissolving into drunken cackles, banging his head on the window.

"I don't know why you're complaining about B.K. coming to the barbecue," said Rollo, waving an unlabeled DVD in Jimmy's face. "Mr. Walsh hasn't seen this in seven years. You think he's going to be upset when I hand it to him?"

Jimmy adjusted the air vents, the hot wind blowing across him. He hadn't said anything to Rollo about what Walsh had told him in the trailer; he had promised Walsh to keep quiet about the good wife and the letter she had written to him in prison. "Silence is golden, tough guy-and safe. I can trust you, can't I?" Jimmy had broken at least nine of the Ten Commandments, but he kept his word. He accelerated, sending Rollo's unopened cardboard boxes sliding across the backseat-a twenty-seven-inch JVC monitor and a Sony DVD player. No receipt, of course.

"You should be proud of me," said Rollo, not letting it go. "B.K. is a film archivist at Trans-World Entertainment, a fucking gnome, man. He's not interested in hardware or Italian suits or any of the usual beads and mirrors I trade in. Just pulling Walsh's rough cut of Hammerlock from the vaults was a risk for him-the dude could go to jail for making me this copy. The only way he was willing to do it was if I introduced him to the man himself." He pushed back his floppy hair. "Besides, I had B.K bring the pie and ice cream."

Jimmy accelerated.

Rollo tightened his seatbelt as the Saab went into a skid, veering toward the sheer drop-off. He fired up a joint, took a couple hits, and started to pass it over. Then the car hit a deep pothole, and he thought better of it. "Me and Mr. Walsh-I think we connected in just the little time we spent together. I'm a filmmaker too. You see the look he gave me when I came back from the party with my camera? He knew. I got about five minutes of great footage of him and the trailer before you dragged me away. I could tell he appreciated my camera work too. No tripod, no steady cam, the real thing, guerrilla tactics, just like he used on Firebug. I'm hoping maybe he and I could collaborate on a project." He nudged the grocery bag between his knees. "That's why I brought something more than sirloin to the barbecue."

"You brought some of your movies too?"

"Just six of them," said Rollo. "Hey, don't give me that look. We got enough beer here for an all-night festival of Rollo's greatest hits."

Jimmy smiled. For all he knew, Rollo would be up on stage accepting an Oscar someday, squinting into the spotlight as he thanked the little people. In L.A. anything was possible. Even Walsh's innocence.

After the scavenger hunt Jimmy had run a Nexus search on Walsh's arrest and trial, hoping to find something that would either bolster or deflate the idea of a setup. The legal documents alone ran to more than four hundred single-spaced pages; Jimmy had been too busy to do more than read the highlights. There was solid forensic evidence against Walsh: His skin was under Heather Grimm's nails, his semen was in her vagina, and her blood was spattered on his purple silk pajama bottoms. No wonder Walsh had pled guilty even though he had no memory of committing the crime. The silk pajamas alone would have been enough to get a conviction in the hands of the right prosecutor. What was missing from the reports was an in-depth portrait of Heather Grimm, something over and beyond "an innocent girl, with a talent for trigonometry and Spanish club bake sales," in the memorable words of some clown from the Times. Nothing in her bio suggested she had the icy calculation needed to take part in setting up Walsh.