Read Online The Glitter Dome by Joseph Wambaugh - Free Book Online

charge. It had been a long time since anything had given Al Mackey a charge.
    Martin Welborn held a morgue photo of Nigel St. Claire in front of Al Mackey’s sunken eyes. The corpse leered at him through broken dentures. The blood had not been scrubbed away, and filigreed his brow like scarlet lace. The eyes were open and staring. He died with a panic mask preserved.
    â€œI think he saw what was coming, Aloysius, my boy.”
    â€œI think I see what’s coming,” Al Mackey said, watching a six-foot redhead in French designer jeans and a green tube top sashay toward a door that said Casting. Maybe he could get a job as a studio cop when he retired? Maybe he should put in an application. Just then another auburn beauty moved like a cheetah in front of the car, smiled at the cadaverous detective, and strolled toward the same doorway. Maybe he should put in his application for studio cop today . Who cared what they paid!
    The inside of the building was a little less disappointing than the outside. At least there were movie posters all over the walls—some old, baroque and elaborate—some vivid, eye-catching and new. Posters from the famous films the studio had distributed for three generations. Some bore likenesses of dead movie stars Al Mackey had nearly forgotten. Some showed cinema stars of the present. But other than that, it wasn’t much different from corporate offices belonging to the huge parent conglomerate. This studio was merely one of the spider’s legs, though its most glamorous leg to be sure.
    Another studio guard directed them to the third floor (there wasn’t even an elevator. What’s this shit? Even police stations have elevators!) where they found the seat of power, the offices of the late Nigel St. Claire, bachelor and bon vivant , president of the film division. His name had been removed from the office directory in the glass case by the stairway. He would be off the stationery by the end of the week. His name had been painted out of the parking lot twenty-six hours after his gutted corpse had been posted by the morgue pathologist and released to a mortuary. (Parking, not pussy, is at a premium around these parts, they said.)
    Nigel St. Claire’s funeral had been top drawer. His eulogy was written by an Oscar-winning screenwriter. It was delivered by an Oscar-winning actress in a brilliant move to counter complaints that Nigel St. Claire’s studio seldom made women’s movies. The funeral entourage was choreographed by an Oscar-winning director.
    In addition to filmdom’s most famous funeral-goers, the choreographer was resourceful enough to employ three SAG “weepers,” two female, one male, the kind who could turn on the waterworks the second anyone yelled “action.”
    Famous mourners had come from all over the world. Nigel St. Claire was greatly loved and had been at the fore of all the humanitarian causes in the film community. He had personally organized and promoted the highly publicized Beverly Hills Banquet to Protest World Hunger, at $2,000 a plate. The black caviar was delivered to the party in a wheelbarrow by two ermine-clad starlets. The Soviet consul sent a laudatory telegram saying that such a caviar purchase went a long way toward patching things up after all those hard hats smashed the cases of vodka during the Afghan incident.
    Nigel St. Claire was likewise the prime mover of the Fund to Preserve Artistic Freedom, not to mention the numerous Save the Dolphins parties. Once he held two parties simultaneously at his three-acre Bel-Air estate, during which Jacques Cousteau specials and famous films that promoted First Amendment guarantees were shown together. It was lots of fun tooting coke and watching Jacques Cousteau pointing toward something on camera left, causing the audience to turn to the next screen where he seemed to be looking at Linda Lovelace with her nasal drip, beating her tonsils on an eight-inch salami in the