Tourist Trap (Rebecca Schwartz #3) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

brown eyes, and regular, not-quite-handsome features. He wore a dark gray suit that didn’t hide the fact that he was a man who took regular exercise seriously. He was smiling—whether at me or my predicament I couldn’t tell.
    “Tosi,” said the maitre d’, and showed us to our table.
    Jeff was an entertainment lawyer, a job that entitles its holder to dine out anywhere in the country—but particularly in San Francisco—on riveting tales of the follies and foibles of the famous. I say particularly San Francisco because we San Franciscans do, in accordance with Angeleno myth, have a bit of a small-town complex. We care not a fig for emulating Eastern sophistication, but desperately want to feel ourselves a part of what we Californians really think makes the world go around—The Industry, as they call it down south. We don’t like to admit it, but we love nothing more than movie gossip. We thrive on rumors of who’s gay and who’s bisexual, who’s stopped beating his wife, who’s pinching whose bottom, who’s burnt out on what drug. But with the snobbery bred of envy, we love best the stories that make Hollywood look silly and gauche and garish. Jeff had a million of them, and being a transplanted New Yorker, with his own geographic bigotry, told them with the same wicked delight that a native Californian might have. I was quiet for a while as he regaled us.
    “So somebody at this studio got the idea to do
Catcher in the Rye
—not bad, huh? It spoke to the last generation, why not this one? Everybody thought it’d be a welcome relief from vampire demolition derby flicks—sort of a thinking kid’s movie. My client was very timid and insisted I go with him for a meeting. This studio exec says, ‘It’s hot, like, it’s the
E.T.
of the eighties, only the alien’s a kid, see? But we gotta make it eighties, not sixties, you know?’ I pointed out that we were really talking fifties, and the guy looks at me like I’m crazy. ‘Fifties?’ he says, like this is a new concept. The guy’s head of the studio and only twenty-seven years old. So I let it go, and he says, ‘Let’s do it like
Miami Vice
, or better yet,
Repo Man
. It’s gotta look like MTV, you know what I mean?’ So we say we’ll think about it and we leave, our heads kind of reeling.
    “We don’t know what to think, maybe the guy’s burnt out on coke or something, but he says he’ll set up another meeting. However, he doesn’t and finally I call him. And guess what? The studio’s already sitting on a proposal for
Catcher in the Rye
. Somebody else got the idea five years ago, only they never made the movie for certain reasons that I’ll reveal in a minute. By now this baby mogul’s completely turned around—convinced the five-year-old idea is the way to go. Here’s what it is: an animated version in which all the characters are dogs.”
    Bob said: “Give me a break!”
    Jeff held up a hand. “This is the verbatim truth. I am not making up one word.”
    “I suppose,” said Chris, “they’re going to call it
Fido
.”
    “
Dufus
. Can you guess what the hang-up is?”
    “The S.P.C.A.,” said Bob.
    “The J. D. Salinger Anti-Defamation League,” said Chris.
    I said, “Salinger.”
    “Almost right. No one in the entire studio, located in fabulous Hollywood, the chutzpah capital of the world, has been able to work up the nerve to approach him.”
    He had me pretty well charmed. I could easily have listened all night, but eventually he started, as politeness demanded, to draw me out. I talked about what was on my mind—the Trapper’s note.
    It couldn’t yet be published, but there was nothing wrong with four pals chewing it over along with the thresher shark. Jeff thought it was hokum—the work of an attention-seeking nut. He also thought the wine a little fruity, the fish a trifle overdone. On the last two points, he was right, perhaps—and yet both were delicious. If it had been left to me, I simply would have enjoyed my dinner rather than dwelt on it. He was a man with a very analytical mind.
    “But something did happen at Pier 39,” I insisted. “How do you explain that?”
    “Simple. This Zimbardo character read about your Sanchez—the man on the cross—and cashed in on it.”
    “But why? What did he have to gain by writing the note: He had everything to lose, it seems to me—he put the cops on guard; they might have stopped him.”
    “I expect he just wanted a little attention. I can identify with