I go into RIP Melanda mode. I can’t help it. “Oliver, you locked me up in here. Our situations are nothing alike.”
“Are you kidding? I saved Forty’s ass on a rape charge before he kicked the bucket. You got in through the sister. We saved their precious fucked-up kids. We both took their money.”
“I didn’t get in through the sister, Oliver. I loved her.”
He smiles. “Does your MILF know that?”
I ignore the question and he sighs. “You say you want out. But do you mean it?”
“Yes, I mean it. Let’s talk out there. It reeks in here.”
“I’m talking big picture, my friend. Why are you living on this poor man’s Nantucket?”
“I chose to move here. That has nothing to do with the Quinns. I wanted to leave L.A. and I wanted to live here and I chose this house.”
“Ah,” he says. “So you wanted to abandon your son?”
“Fuck no, Oliver. That’s different. I didn’t have a choice about that and you know it.”
Oliver nods. Smug. “And finally, light dawns on Marblehead.”
Oliver’s just like RIP Melanda, Mary Kay. He doesn’t believe that people can grow and change their minds and I don’t want to be analyzed by this failed writer turned Privacy Invader and I tell him he’s right—it hurts—and I ask him what happens next. Any good writer should be able to answer that question but Oliver failed as a writer.
“We’ll get to that,” he says. “First, I gotta know. What was your magic number?”
“You mean what did they pay me? Oliver, they pointed a gun at my head. I had to sign the contract.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was it? Eight mill to leave your kid? Ten?”
This is why I’m in the cage. Oliver isn’t entirely wrong and I did it. I took the money. But I didn’t sell my son.
“Four million,” I say. “Plus the house.”
“The house they bought for you.”
“The house is in my name.”
“Well, isn’t that nice of them? My Benz is in my name too. Thing is though, I can’t afford the payments if I quit working for them.”
I don’t want to be like Oliver and I am not like Oliver. “Okay,” he says. “Brass tacks. I have video of you and the dead chick…”
Woman not chick and I tell him I didn’t kill her and he sighs. “Well, my friend, if I called the local yokel cops right now and they saw you in that room with her blood on the walls…”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“It doesn’t matter, Goldberg. All that matters is how it looks. Now listen up. I sent those pictures to Gordy but Gordy has not shown those pictures to Ray… If he does that, you’ll get thrown in jail, and they won’t need me to watch you anymore. I’ll be out of a job. The Quinns will win.”
“What do you want?”
Oliver settles into his chair like any aspiring writer about to pitch his shitty story and I am the executive so I lean forward because I have to lean forward. I want to buy his pitch. I want to get the fuck out of here and be with you. “You and me are from the wrong side of the trust fund, my friend. The Quinns found us. They see our potential, our brains, and they like to squash it because their own kids never had what we have. We’re not a part of the old boys’ club and we never will be, but what we have here is an opportunity to create a young boys’ club. A poor boys’ club, if you will.”
“Oliver, I don’t follow. What do we do in this ‘club’？”
He’s a defensive writer so he tells me that I don’t have to follow as if it’s my fault that his pitch is muddled. “We help each other out. I don’t show Ray what you did to this chick and you help me because you got paid a helluva lot more than I did, my friend.”
“You want money.”
“My mom’s sick, so my cash flow is a bit tight.” He’s human again, the way he was when he first mentioned his brother, and he breaks eye contact. “My mom has cancer and fuck cancer is right because that shit is expensive.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And my girlfriend Minka… she’s a ten…” I hate it when men do that, when they rate you like they hold the cards and you’re all in swimsuits. “And a ten has certain expectations of a man and I want to hold on to my ten and we just moved in and the walls are a little bare for her tastes and she’s all about the reno, she’s way into antiques and she’s going for this Sweet American Psycho vibe…” I knew it. I knew his hair was on purpose. “So you help me keep my ten in antiques and I help you keep those Quinns off your back.”
I can’t say yes fast enough but then Oliver makes a face that reminds me of his failed screenwriting aspirations. He stares at the blood on the windows. “I know you, Goldberg. And it’s important that you know me. Gordo and I communicate in a very unique way and if he contacts me and doesn’t hear back in our very unique way, he shows Ray the pictures and you’re in a cage that smells a lot worse than this one. Point is, you make me go away, you go away too. You feel me?”
“I get it. I’m in.” And then I say what he wants to hear, the name of his show. “Poor Boys Club is on.”
Oliver puts the key in the door but then he hesitates. It’s a myth about cages and I’ve been where he was, I was just there a few hours ago, holding the key, aware that my life was at stake too. “When I was a screenwriter”—No, Oliver, you wrote one episode of television—“we had this phrase on the nose.” I’m not a moron but it’s kind of like hanging out with Seamus. Sometimes you have to let your Friends think they’re broadening your horizons so I nod like that phrase is foreign to me. “What you did to this chick tonight was too on the nose, too on brand. So when I let you outta here, you’re gonna behave. No more of the bad shit. No Instastalking Love, no dead chicks in the dungeon. Nada. Zilch. Nothing. You so much as steal a plastic fork from Starbucks and you’re done.”
Oliver turns the key. “Wait,” he says. “Do you have a 1stdibs account?”
I shake my head. “No.”
He lets me out of the cage as if it isn’t in my house and he hands me my phone.
“Download the 1stdibs app,” he says. “Pronto.”
I download the rich-people shopping app and I open an account and I look at him. “Now what?”
“Search for ‘Mike Tyson,’？” he says. “There’s a portrait by Albert Watson and you’re gonna buy it for me.”
I blow twenty-five thousand dollars on a photograph of Mike Fucking Tyson and Oliver stretches his arms—those pit stains are worse up close—and he asks me where I store my cleaning products. “Amateurs don’t know how to clean up after a crime. We don’t want the Poor Boys Club to end before it starts.”
I give Oliver a mop and I find a bottle of bleach and soon we’re scrubbing Melanda’s last words from the glass wall. Oliver sneezes into his elbow. “At my first job back home, I had to clean the women’s bathroom at the ferry dock. Nothing will ever be as nasty as that.”