L.A. Success by Hans C. Freelac

money. Spieldburt probably knew that private investigators got paid by the day—who knows how many times he'd hired one before—so I couldn't ask him for a ton of money for something I had done in under a week. I decided that if I got the goods on Gertie this weekend, I'd keep it from Spieldburt until a few more weeks had passed. I'd string him on with a little more info every week, and that way when I finally gave him the pictures of Gertie rubbing those smoky whiskers of hers all over some dude, he'd be so exhausted and angry that he wouldn't even notice my enormous fee.
     
    29
    That morning I had my dad walk the big poodle while I hit the store and bought some more supplies, mainly more clothes for him and chocolate for sculpting. So far, he hadn't gotten too bored with this arrangement.
    I needed to find out how to get in touch with Spieldburt. I figured he'd want an update, and since I was about to begin the next phase of my plan, this would be a good time to sum up everything I'd done so far. He had told me that he didn't want to be contacted because he didn't want anyone to be able to put us together, but I was feeling pretty sneaky, so I wasn't worried about it.
    I knew I could drive around Hollywood and pick up a star map from someone, but even if Spieldburt did have a house in L.A., his old lady would be stalking around there. I needed to find him at work, where I could try to blend in long enough to get close to him. Lucky for me I now had contacts in the movie business.
    That afternoon the big poodle and I took the Charger to my Starbuck's stakeout place. I read over my notes for tomorrow's open house so my writer buddies would think I was working, but as soon as I thought I'd put in enough time, I went after what I needed to know.
    When USC-Shirt Jake got up to grab another coffee, I followed him and got behind him in line.
    “Hey Jake,” I said, "don't tell this to anyone, but I got a sweet idea that I'm working on. The thing is, I don't want to get too far in before I get permission to run with it. It uses someone else's characters, but I'm sure the guy will like it. It's completely in the spirit of the original movie.”
    “Oh yeah? Getting permission to write a sequel for someone is a real long shot, to be honest.”
    “I know, but this is the shit.”
    “What is it, if you don't mind me asking?”
    “Well, you ever see that extra-terrestrial movie, with the crazy glowing finger?” He looked at me like it was a stupid question.
    “Um yeah,” he said with a valley-girl accent.
    “Here's the deal. Every good movie ends with people doing it. That movie didn't show us the doing, but you know it happened. Are we really supposed to believe that that little green dude just got in the ship at the end and that was the end of it? Come on! His friends forgot about him, left him on a strange planet, and then didn’t even realize he was missing until he called them. There's going to be a lot of guilt there. So my movie starts with the little dude getting it on with all the guilty alien chicks on the ship. But what none of them realizes is that he's spreading a human virus around to everyone. Now, he's got immunity to this because he's eaten so much human food, but everyone else is going to croak wicked fast. That leaves our little guy with no one to do, so he gets all enraged, comes back to Earth and goes futuristic all over us. He captures a whole harem of beautiful chicks that he can't actually do because he doesn't have the right equipment, and that just makes him even angrier and crazier.”
    “You should definitely look into getting permission for that before you spend any time on it,” Jake said.
    “Where do I go for that?” He told me Spieldburt had his own studio up in Glendale. As soon as I got a coffee, I grabbed my stuff and took off in the Charger.
     
    30
    I drove downtown and then cut up north past Dodger stadium. It was really hot out there and the pollution was a lot worse than it was near