Ten days later Carleton Grimes called and asked me to meet him for lunch at Pierino’s. Popeye was parked on Clara Bow Drive, so I left fifteen minutes early to give myself time to lose him in traffic. He drove a lumbering Chevy. I drove the Silver Bullet and drove it well, like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, complete with broad-brimmed hat. I knew the shortcuts. I lost him, and I thought myself quite clever. Nonetheless, as I gave the keys to my car to the kid doing valet parking, I said, “If a frumpy guy in a gray sedan comes up and asks to see inside my car, and you let him, I will sue you from here to the rest of your life.”

I sashayed in, and the waiter led me to Carleton’s table, where the script of Adios Diablo sat on the table.

After the ordinary falsehoods of greeting, he said, “Tell me about Art Luke. Why have I never heard of him?”

“He’s written a couple of detective pictures, and a monster flicker for Poverty Row, nothing especially memorable. But Adios Diablo, he’s been working on this for years. He’s passionate about it. He grew up in Mexico. His father met Pancho Villa.”

“It’s a fine story, Roxanne. Really. I have just the young director for it too, Sam Pepper. Heard of him?” I hadn’t. “Mostly he’s done TV Westerns, writing, directing, but the weekly episode—beginning, middle, end in thirty minutes—it’s too narrow and finite for him. Sam needs a bigger palette. But this . . .” He thrummed his fingers on the script. “Train wrecks have been expensive since the days of Buster Keaton.” Then he went off on a long aside about Buster Keaton and how much he admired him, and did I know him, and of course I did . . . As I kept up my end of this long, oblique conversation, I told myself, if the answer were simply no, I would not be here. Carleton was like a dragonfly, skirting over the reflective surface of the Hollywood pond, veering off into amusing anecdotes, returning to ask something more probing about Art, about Adios Diablo, talking about Paragon, still the Hollywood underdog, though not so underdog as to be down there with the Poverty Row boys. Why hadn’t I taken Adios Diablo to Poverty Row? Well, because it wasn’t B-movie material.

“I can see why you didn’t take it to Empire,” he said. “At least, I’m assuming you didn’t take it there.”

“Leon wouldn’t touch this with rubber gloves and a surgical mask. The story is too bold. He’s still operating under the ‘Screen Guide for Americans’ that Ayn Rand wrote in forty-seven.”