Warren Murphy: American Obsession

They did. In middle of the man's shoulder pads, the neck hole of his uniform yawned. It was empty. "Oh, Jesus, where's his head?" Chunk cried. "Where's the quarterback's fucking head?"

"Look in his hat," Chiun suggested, snuggling deeper into the La-Z-Boy.

The camera zoomed in on the missing helmet, which rested top side up on the carpet at midfield. There was a face inside it, and remarkably the chin strap was still buckled. The angle of the shot produced a disturbing illusion: it looked like the QB had just poked his head up through the Astroturf for a quick peek around.

From his expression, he didn't like what he saw. The feeling seemed universal.

Players from both teams turned away from the red helmet, some of them slack jawed with horror, others bent over at the waist, puking through their face guards. This while Bradley the Fighting Vehicle Boomtower continued to strut his stuff: slow-motion moonwalking, he struck classic bodybuilder poses to the beat of the sideline photographers' flashguns. Understandably incensed, the Lobster bench rose up en masse and attacked the showboating nose tackle, burying him under a heap of bodies. Not to be outdone, Boomtower's whole team rushed onto the field to try to defend him. The roar of the hometown crowd drowned out Chunk, Sal and Freddy as the stadium police surrounded the wildly shifting, hundred-man dog pile.

Then, abruptly, the network cut away from the live-action melee to a row of triple-bacon cheeseburgers dancing the Macarena.

"Fifteen yards," Chiun proudly announced. Remo shook his head to clear it. Smoke from the burning wok hung heavy in the room. "What's fifteen yards?"

"The penalty for roughing the passer."

As Remo opened his mouth to speak, the telephone rang. It was the scrambled line.

Chapter 3

Like the tire of some gigantic earthmover, the landmark sign loomed over the flat white cinder roof of the Big-O doughnut shop. Dramatically lit from beneath on both sides, the dimpled stucco ring could be seen for blocks up and down busy Sepulveda Boulevard. No doughnut known to man was ever so huge, so pink, so utterly indigestible.

Chiz Graham stood under the Big-O's red awning, watching through the service window as a plump, short Latina girl in a white paper hat and long braids finished pulling together his order from the rolling racks of freshly baked treats. The clerk was so short she had to reach up to push the pair of wide, flat boxes across the counter to him.

"Por, favor, Senor Cheez... " she said, straining on tiptoe to stick her bare arm through the service window. Fingers gloved in clear plastic offered him a black permanent marker.

Chiz uncapped the broad-tipped markie, and with big, looping flourishes, autographed the inside of her brown forearm from wrist to elbow. He wrote, "Warmest wishes, Chiz Graham."

"Muchas gracias, " she cooed, cradling her autographed arm to her bosom like a newborn babe.

"De nada," said the movie star, scooping up the boxes.

As he turned for the waiting limo, the girl clawed herself above the level of the counter so she could watch the action-film Adonis walk away. At his broad, densely muscled back, she aimed a shrill, undulating cry: the same hair-raising sound voiced by female ballet folclorico dancers-and chickadees in heat. She punctuated the "I am Woman" yodel with a heartfelt "Estupendo!"

Long accustomed to having girls go glassy-eyed at the sight of his massive, jutting buttocks, Graham paid her no mind. All he was thinking about was the fragrant burden-the forty-eight oven-fresh doughnuts-he carried. His jaws ached in anticipation of their succulent, deep-fried goodness. He felt a ferocious urge to sit down on the curb and eat every single one of them himself.

But he knew if he did, there would be pure hell to pay.

As he reached far the limo's rear door, it swung open. Crouched inside, in the midst of the litter of empty paper bags from the BurgerMeister up the block, in her black Gucci tank top, matching leather micromini and stiletto-heeled ankle boots, was Puma Lee, the movie star's even bigger movie star of a wife. The ravishing, tawny-skinned, raven-haired grade-school dropout pronounced her screen name "Poo-mah," not "Pew-mah," and everyone in the show-biz know followed suit.

Without a word, the leggy beauty snatched one of the boxes from him. Before he could get the limo door shut, Puma was stuffing heavily sugar iced cinnamon-apple fritters into her face with both hands. Chiz sat in one of the jump seats, as far away from her as he could get. Hunched protectively over his own flat of treats, he started ramming assorted glazed doughnuts into his mouth. For Chiz and Puma, the act of eating had become an athletic event, in this case, the twenty-four-doughnut sprint. Neither wanted to be the last to finish, because neither wanted to share the stub end of the final cruller with the other. Rainbow sprinkles and shards of icing glaze flew left and right, as did the grunting, gulping sounds of their frantic swallowing.

The noise was such that the uniformed limo driver lowered the one-way privacy window to make sure his passengers were both all right. In his rearview mirror, he watched the highest-paid actors in motion-picture history make total pigs of themselves.

It was common knowledge in Tinseltown that between the two of them, Chiz and Puma pulled in a minimum of thirty million dollars per film. Puma invariably commanded a good deal more money than Chiz-and the salary gap was a touchy subject. He had been typecast by the industry as an action-adventure star who showed his bare behind; Puma had a much wider dramatic range. She was perfectly believable taking off all her clothes not only in summer shoot-'em-ups, but also in historical romances, modern-relationship pictures, cancer tear-jerkers, disaster flicks and Shakespearean rehashes.

The driver wrinkled his nose as he caught a whiff of something dank and musky floating through the window from the back. He'd read the tabloid stories about how the celebrity couple always bathed in vintage sauvignon blanc. He decided that whatever liquid they soaked themselves in, they didn't use soap. Having hauled around Hollywood types for half his adult life, the driver thought he'd witnessed every conceivable eccentricity of the filthy rich. But even a bingeing Orson Welles couldn't hold a candle to these two. Like wild animals, Chiz and Puma sought out and gobbled the lowest forms of junk food. And the question the chauffeur kept asking himself was how could people who ate so bad look so good?

By the time the limo driver exited the parking lot and merged with oncoming traffic on Sepulveda, four dozen assorted doughnuts were history. He started to accelerate in order to change lanes for the freeway ramp.

"No, pull in there," Chiz told him, waving to the right.

"Excuse me, sir," the driver said, "but we're going to be late for the benefit if we stop again-"

"He told you to pull in!" Puma snarled.

End of discussion. "Yes, ma'am," the driver said flatly.

Their new destination was Tito's Tacos, another fast-food landmark of West Los Angeles. It lurked in the shadow of an elevated section of Interstate 405. With the double-parked limo blocking half the small lot, Chiz trotted up to the outside service window.

"Aue quieres, senor?" asked a guy with pomaded salt-and-pepper hair, long sideburns and a pencil-thin mustache. For forty years he had been folding tortillas at the same location, and in an identical white polyester guayabera shirt. Awaiting Chiz's response, he held the stub of a pencil poised on a paper pad. Over his shoulder, one of the cooks-a shorter, wider version of the counterman-lowered stainless-steel baskets of tacos into boiling vats of dark amber oil. A peculiarity of Tito's cuisine, the picadillo meat was already packed inside the folded tortilla shells when they were plopped into the deep fryer. This meant that as the meat was heated, it soaked up oil like a sponge.