Chapter 5

This is mostly backstory, tying together with any luck some of the elements introduced by previous authors.

By the way, I hate self editing and proofing my own stuff so be prepared for dangling clauses, spelling mistakes and God knows what.

Who's next then?

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It had so nearly been a pointless day. Driving aimlessly round the freeway system, Ryan had half expected to see Eddie on every street corner. But of course he hadn’t. Getting his bearings is what he’d been doing, he told himself. Getting his bearings.

On the other hand, the conversation with the Mexican whore on Hollywood Boulevard had been illuminating. She’d been carrying a big box of chocolates and an even bigger grudge and when she’d heard Ryan’s English accent as he was talking to the meter maid, she had strutted over and had told him a few very interesting facts indeed. It was pure serendipity of course that he’d known which bastard fucking perro Englishman she was shrieking about, but he hadn’t let on.

“Goddam Godiva,” she’d screamed through his car window. “Cheap hijo de puta! Twenty fucking dollars on a box of low grade candy and he spends twelve hundred dollars on an airfare for himself and doesn’t even say goodbye! Can I come to your hotel room?”

He could see planes taking off from LAX from his hotel window. He’d said no of course, given her a couple of hundreds, apologised on behalf of the UK. He watched for a while as the sun set into the LA smog. Who was on those planes? People fleeing the shards of their dreams, shattered by the reality of life in the City of Angels? Tourists, their carbon footprint as big as their fat asses in their chinos? Eddie?

Philé had been as good as her word – meetings previously billed as urgent had been suddenly postponed for three days, with no explanation. It was hardly worth Ryan flying back to the UK for the sake of a three day hiatus – the time was his. Or rather Eddie’s, he reflected bitterly. What was new?

He’d last seen Eddie 20 years ago. Then, it had been the three of them: Ryan, Eddie, Caro. Fresh out of university, all their lives before them. Brilliant, funny Eddie. Sexy, kittenish Caro. Ryan had been half in love with both of them.

But even then there had been signs of the trouble to come. Eddie, the maths genius with a bag full of comedy one-liners, already using his abilities in small time scams. Fleecing casinos, what was the harm in that? It had seemed so much more exciting than the accountancy traineeship, which Eddie had stuck with for precisely three weeks. Then someone, who had witnessed, if not entirely appreciated, the game that netted Eddie £500,000 in one evening from a Mayfair casino, made him a career change proposal he was frankly too flattered to turn down. It was round about then that Eddie had started to make the regular weekend trips to Iceland that he refused to discuss.

Caro – it was sticky cocktails in those days, with those tacky little Chinese umbrellas in them that used to leach their dye into the alcohol infused sweat on her face. She would go through eight, ten of them an evening, sitting in bars in those ridiculous strapless ballgowns she wore all the time, even to lectures. She was young – she wore the drinking well in those days and it was to be another few years before she developed a taste for straight spirits without the coloured cream liqueurs and sickly cordials. They had both been sleeping with her in those days – and God knows who else too. Ryan had never told her how he felt. It was clear to him that she loved Eddie and Eddie loved her and that was the way it was. Yet then she’d gone off with one of their tutors, married him, bore him a child. It was at that point that Eddie had gone off the deep end.

Initially Ryan had got a kick out of knowing Eddie. By day, trainee IT sales manager. By night, friends with criminals. Live in Epsom, drink in Mayfair. It was like a scarlet silk lining in a grey pinstripe suit – it made the mundane bearable.

But then it started getting stupid. By then Ryan was starting to work with banks as customers and Eddie was starting to work with banks as jobs. He knew that Eddie was beginning to view him as a source of information about potential targets and that made him uncomfortable. So Ryan became a good citizen and turned Eddie in.

Ryan sighed, swigged at his minibar vodka and 7Up and watched the setting sun glint of the wings of another jet, heading east out of LAX. It hadn’t been like that at all.

Caro had come back. Baby safely stowed with her soon to ex-husband, she wanted her old life back and Eddie, with his air of glamour, his wads of 1980s cash, his mysterious trips to Iceland, looked like he could supply it and more. Ryan, boring Ryan with his late model Granada, his sales conferences in Birmingham, his bungalow in Epsom was very clearly second choice. And he would have stayed that way, if Eddie’s luck hadn’t run out.

Fair’s fair really. Ryan might have let on about a certain bank’s security systems being down one weekend for upgrades. Eddie might have accidentally let slip, after a beer or ten, that that piece of news meshed in nicely with a projected job in Oldham. Ryan, not drinking that night, might have later made a muffled call from a phone box to the police.

All that might have happened. What did happen was that Eddie was arrested just south of Sheffield in a Porsche with Icelandic number plates, carrying a sawn off shotgun. And that was the end of Eddie for ten years or so.

After a reasonable interval, say three weeks, Ryan just happened to invite Caro out to dinner to a place that had an amazing selection of Scotches and not that long after, when her first divorce came through, they married.

And he had regretted it ever since, he thought, as dusk filled the hotel room.

Of course Eddie got out eventually and by some miracle he did not immediately get in touch with Ryan with a view to revenge. No, he pursued new career options and what he wanted, according to all the interviews in the red-tops, was to make it big in Hollywood as a writer.

Why not?

If a Glaswegian murderer could be rehabilitated as a sculptor and arts pundit, there was no reason at all why ex-gangster and maths genius Eddie Roberts could not make it as a comedy scriptwriter in Hollywood. Stranger things had happened. God knows, the latter half of Eddie’s crime career had been a comedy in its own right. Of course there had been that post release rehabilitation stint at the BBC – typical middle class wankery – you employ an ex-con and mathematician in the accounts department, what do you expect to have happen? Eddie was lucky to have escaped fresh imprisonment on that one.

But the projects he had boasted about to Variety with Seinfeld, Ellen, Robin Williams had come to nothing, or not as far as Ryan could tell (and Ryan had been keeping a very close eye on what Eddie was up to). And the stress of failure was beginning to tell on Eddie, if Carmen was to be believed - a return to gambling, late night phone calls in Icelandic, delusions that the late Queen Regent of Swaziland was controlling his actions via his mobile phone. "Loco," Carmen had said.

It was time for Eddie to come home, if only, thought Ryan, to take Caro off his hands. Although that wasn’t the only reason, not by any means.

So it was ironic, to say the very least, and a very unwelcome complication that at the very moment Ryan had arrived in LA, Eddie had packed his Icelandic dictionary, his electronic plane ticket and had left the US.