Imperial Bedrooms

At the Hollywood Forever Cemetery I recognize very few of the people who show up for the memorial and they're mostly just figures from the past who I don't know anymore and I wasn't even going to go but I had finished two projects in the last couple days that I had been ignoring, one was a remake of The Man Who Fell to Earth and the other was a script about the reformation of a young Nazi, and the last scene I wrote was when a boy in a castle is being shown a row of fresh corpses by a madman in a uniform who keeps asking the boy if he knows any of the dead and the boy keeps answering no but he's lying, and I was staring at the bottle of Hendrick's that sat on my desk while on the TV in my office Amanda Flew's mother was being interviewed on CNN, after she had filed a complaint about the release of the video but she was told that privacy rights don't extend to the dead even though Amanda's body hasn't been found, and there was a montage of Amanda's brief career with "Girls on Film" playing on the sound track as the piece segues into the dangers of the drug wars across the border, and I was trying to make a decision that seemed daunting either way and for a moment I thought about checking out.

I arrive late just as the memorial concludes, and I'm standing in the back of the room scanning the small crowd as Julian's father walks by and doesn't recognize me. Rain isn't here and neither is Rip, who for whatever reason I thought would be, and Trent didn't show up but Blair's here with Alana and I duck out before she sees me, and then I'm walking past the Buddhist cemetery where the dead are guarded by mirror-lined stupas and peacocks roam the graves and I'm staring up at the Paramount water tower, through the bristling palm trees, and I'm wearing a Brioni suit that had once fit but is now too loose and I keep thinking I see figures lurking behind the headstones but I tell myself it's just my imagination, taking my sunglasses off, squeezing my eyes shut. The cemetery pushes up to the back walls of the Paramount lot and you could find meaning in that or be neutral about it in the same way you could find something ironic about the endless rows of the dead lined up beneath the palm trees with their fronds blooming against a sparkling blue sky or choose not to, and I'm looking at the sky thinking it's the wrong time of day for a memorial, but the day, the sunlight, chases the ghosts away and isn't that the point? They show movies here during the summer, I remember, studying the giant white wall of the mausoleum where the movies are projected.

"How are you?"

Blair is standing over me. I'm sitting on a bench next to a tree but there's no shade and the sun is burning.

"I'm okay," I say in a hopeful voice.

She doesn't take her sunglasses off. She's wearing a black dress that accentuates her thinness.

From where I'm sitting I watch the dispersing crowd, their cars pulling out onto Santa Monica Boulevard, and farther away there's a bulldozer digging a fresh grave.

"I guess I'm worried," I say. "A little."

"Why?" she asks, sounding concerned, like someone trying to comfort a child. "About what?"

"I've been questioned twice," I say. "I had to hire a new lawyer." I pause. "They think I'm involved."

Blair doesn't say anything.

"They say there were witnesses who saw me with him the night of his disappearance and ... " I look away from her and don't mention that the only person I could imagine this to be true of now that I'm sure the three Mexicans are dead is the doorman at the Doheny Plaza but when the doorman was interviewed he couldn't remember anything and there were no records because I'd told him before Julian arrived that I was expecting a delivery and to just send up whoever stopped by, and all I've done is deny everything and tell everyone that I might have seen Julian earlier that week but the fact remains I don't have an alibi for the night I drove him to the corner of Finley and Commonwealth and I know Rip Millar and Rain both know this. "Which means ... well, I don't know what it means," I murmur, and then try to smile. "A lot of things, I guess." The Hollywood sign blares from the hills and a helicopter flies low over the cemetery and a small group dressed in black is wandering through the headstones. I've only been here for fifteen minutes.

"Well," Blair starts haltingly, "if you didn't do anything, why are you worried?"

"They think I might have been part of ... a plan," I say casually. "I actually heard the word 'conspiracy' used."

"What can they prove?" she asks softly.

"They have a tape someone thinks is incriminating ... this ... this drunken rant I made at Julian one night and ... " I stop. "Well, I was sleeping with his girlfriend so ... " I look up at her and then away. "I think I know who's involved and I think they're going to get away with it ... but no one knows where I was."