The Cutting Room by Laurence Klavan Read Free Book Online

still had such profoundly mixed feelings. She was a trusting person, and easily hurt. She had trusted me, but I was no Ben Williams. I reached out and touched her hand, very, very briefly.
    “Not more than anything else,” I said.
    Annie Chin was comforted by my tone. Instinctively, she touched the mole on her cheek. Then, fully linked to me, she asked, “So why do
you
want to kill Gus Ziegler?”
    I laughed a little, as she did, sniffling. “It’s Gus who might have killed someone. After he stole something. What he gave to Ben.”
    Annie nodded, with a small grunt of understanding. But she didn’t even care what it was. She just tore off a piece of her paper place setting and wrote on it, stabbed it, with her pen.
    “Here,” she said. “This is the home phone and address of his new assistant. Her name is Beth Brenner. Just look for a really stupid bitch.”
    Annie slid the paper over to me, laughing at the depth of her emotions. As she did, the sleeves of her denim jacket rode up and revealed small bandages on both of her wrists.
    Though I couldn’t afford it, I paid for her meal, anyway.
    “So,” Jeanine said later, sitting next to a new pile of magazines on her cousin Larry’s bed. “Has she called you back yet?”
    She was referring to Beth Brenner, Ben’s new assistant, for whom I had left several messages.
    I shook my head no. “Maybe it was a mistake to mention Orson Welles.”
    “Don’t beat yourself up,” she said evenly. “You thought it would intrigue her.”
    “I think it scared her off.”
    “Well”—she pulled out a jangling set of rental car keys—“since you insisted, let’s go.”
    It was a late Saturday afternoon. I approached the door while Jeanine waited in the car outside Beth’s two-story apartment house in West Hollywood. We had decided that confronting her at Ben Williams’s office, or, God forbid, his home—addresses Jeanine had cribbed from Abner—would be a mistake. At Beth’s home, I could try to speak my piece, make sure she got it, and run, like a man slipping a menu under an apartment door in New York. Did they do that in L.A.?
    I saw none in the small vestibule, where I pressed her buzzer.
    “Yes?” came a young female’s voice.
    “Is this Beth?”
    There was a pause. Then, “Get lost, creepo,” she said.
    The buzzer clicked off, without another word. I waited for what seemed a spectacularly long time. There was only silence.
    Then, through the window on the vestibule door, I saw a police car pull up outside.
    I remembered that, when the original
Scarface
was released, some states showed a different ending, in which Paul Muni was hanged for his crimes. But since Muni was already working on another film, they just used a stand-in, a trapdoor, and a hangman.
    Pressing my back to the wall, I peeked out and watched the cop car park behind Jeanine. The door opened, and a blond cop, in much better shape than he would have been in New York, emerged. He walked to Jeanine’s window, and they spoke.
    My heart began pounding loudly. I could only imagine what Jeanine was doing—feigning ignorance of the city, or imitating flirtatiousness, or reading his palm. Whatever it was, the conversation soon ended. Jeanine turned on her motor. Then, glancing once furtively at the front of the building, she drove away. After a second, the cop got back into his car and did the same.
    Left behind, I waited, swallowing very deeply. Then I exited the apartment house and walked out into the sun.
    It wasn’t a warm day, by my new California standards, but I was still soaked with sweat. As I walked quickly up the little street toward the broad boulevard—Melrose? I wasn’t sure—I glanced behind me.
    A young woman was leaving Beth Brenner’s building. She was in a hurry.
    She didn’t fit Annie Chin’s definition, by any stretch of the imagination. She was red-haired and long-legged and—if she had called the cops to get rid of me—pretty smart, as well. But, either way, Beth