I was certainly unhappy to see his car on Clara Bow Drive one November afternoon when he followed me up to Laurel Canyon. I was going to Jonathan’s to give him first glimpse at a script by Maurice Allen (one of Nelson’s that Maurice had completed), a serious drama I thought would appeal to him. I pulled into the Casa Fiesta driveway beside Jonathan’s car and turned off the motor. On the driver’s side of my car was a big, old Packard. It had long scratches on the passenger’s side. That’s the car I was driving when I rolled it down a ravine in high school. I didn’t know Leon still owned it, but then I hadn’t been in the Summit Drive garages since the day I moved out three years ago. I looked up to the bedroom window and saw a curtain twitch, and a flash of bright blonde hair. I started my car and left immediately, watching Popeye in the rearview mirror all the way back to Clara Bow Drive. I watch the rearview mirror a lot more than I used to.

Jonathan telephoned me that night. His voice was theatrically upbeat as he cascaded reams of juicy gossip. Diana Jordan (who had indeed eloped) was about to work again. Bongo had been arrested for indecent exposure, and Jonathan had to call his own attorney, Adam Ornstein, to bail him out. People kept showing up at Casa Fiesta thinking the parties must still be going on . . . He nattered on and on. I made one-syllable replies. And then he said that Denise had dropped by that afternoon to rehearse. Though what they were rehearsing he did not say. “You understand, Quacker? You see what I am saying? Don’t you?”

“Oh yes, I understand,” I said before he hung up.

Terrence looked up from the bed, where he had the out-of-town papers spread out, comparing coverage. He took off his glasses. “What in hell was that all about? What’s wrong with Jonathan? What does he want from you now?”

“Nothing,” I said, unable to bring myself to put in actual words that I knew, deep down, that the longest friendship of my life had tattered into lies and distrust. On both sides. We each had a lot to lose.

Chapter Twenty-two

Popeye wasn’t there the afternoon that I drove to the Culver City post office to pick up a script that would change many lives. We had a key to this post office box, and Susan Strassman had a key, and that’s how she gave us her father’s scripts and how we paid her when we sold them. (And we did. My hunch about Warner Brothers Television and the adult Westerns was absolutely correct.) This envelope had in it just one script, and a note. This one is different. Daddy has quit drinking and fighting and falling out of bed. Thank you so much, Roxanne. Love, Susan.