Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [79]
You happy, Charlie?
You happy you let all of this happen?
O’Neal made one last visual sweep of the hotel room. No fibers had been left behind, no trace of them whatsoever. This was familiar turf—he’d worked dozens of hotel jobs before. He felt like he knew how to hit the Reset button on a hotel room better than career maids did. No trace of them was left. The only evidence left behind told the sad tale of…
Charles D. Hardie, a police consultant turned house sitter turned raging alcoholic, finally breaks with reality once he crosses paths with his favorite movie star, Lane Madden.
Hardie has been to Hollywood before and spies on Madden whenever possible. He takes another house-sitting assignment because he knows she’ll be in town—he’s been reading about her in the entertainment rags. Friday night Hardie follows her back to her Venice apartment after a party in Brentwood, then all the way through the mountains, past Mulholland Drive, and down the 101.
But he’s too eager. He brakes his rental vehicle too fast, causing an accident. Panicked, he loads Madden into his car, then flees the scene. His unbalanced mind creates a “hero” fantasy where he’s saving her from unknown attackers—just like in the action movies featuring Ms. Madden.
Hardie brings her to the house he’s been hired to watch, up in the Hollywood Hills. Madden tries to escape, at one point even stabbing Hardie. Enraged, Hardie beats her savagely and sets the house ablaze and then forces Madden into a landscaping-company van just up the hill, then drives down to Hollywood proper to continue his psychotic fantasy.
Believing this a date, Hardie forces Madden into the famous Musso & Frank, much to the shock of the staff—but no one summons the police, because Madden is well known for exhibiting strange behavior in public. Madden, to her credit, tries to play along, hoping to defuse the ticking time bomb that is Charles Daniel Hardie.
But the ruse breaks down. Hardie brings her back to a hotel in Los Feliz, breaking into a room, where he proceeds to beat and eventually strangle Madden to death. The police find him on the floor of the hotel room, paralyzed with shock, still rambling about these “Accident People” who were trying to kill her.
Mann wasn’t exactly proud of the narrative. It was far from her best work, and there were holes galore to plug (the flight times, accident reports, rental-car damages to duplicate). But there were no easy narratives once Hardie had injected himself into the narrative so audaciously and publicly. So the narrative was rewritten to give him a supporting role. Hell, Mann was giving Hardie immortality. From now on, Charles Daniel Hardie would be mentioned in the same breath as Mark David Chapman and Robert John Bardo and Anthony Gary Silvestri. Names that would be uttered in celebrity circles for years to come; Hardie would become a spook story, a cautionary tale.
And considering the dirty laundry Hardie had left behind in Philadelphia, it was doubtful people would fall over themselves to clear his name. Trying to prove otherwise would dredge up a lot of shit that the city would prefer stay buried.
Now it was time to summon the police and make their way to the real job—the one that, until this morning, she’d thought would be the tricky one. Not the case. Compared with the miracles her small team had had to perform during the past fifteen hours, this would be relatively simple. They didn’t even have to do anything. Just sit in the van with O’Neal and let things happen.
“We good?”
“All clear,” O’Neal said.
Mann knew she couldn’t touch Hardie, even though she longed to smash his eyes back into his skull with her fists. Instead she contented herself with stooping down, lifting his chin with gloved fingers, and saying:
“See ya in Hell, tough guy.”
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