Indecent Exposure Read Free Page B

reasonable explanation for the confusion and that they would investigate further and stay in touch.
    Caudillo, however, had no intention of investigating further himself. He took the file to his immediate superior, the Columbia studio controller. Louis Phillips. Caudillo and Phillips had been close friends for years, and Phillips was the only person in whom Caudillo felt free to confide his suspicions.
    "I think I know who signed tha t check, Lou." Caudillo said. "I think Begelman himself endorsed it."
    Lou Phillips, a precise, careful man both in speech and manner, perused the check and correspondence. Without responding to Caudillo's fear, he said he would look into the matter and that Dick shouldn't concern himself with it any further.
    THREE
    James T. Johnson, the Columbia studio's vice president for administration, was fond of quipping that he and Frank Sinatra were Hoboke n, New Jersey's principal contributions to American show business. Although Johnson savored his company title and the accompanying perquisites, it was his nature to twit his modest role in the entertainment world rather than inflate it. Unlike many eastern street kids who had gotten CPA licenses, come to Hollywood, and put on airs, Jim Johnson had never bothered to smooth all of h is rough edges and become a nove au-snob. He owned a spacious four-bedroom house in Encino and drove a Cadillac provided by the studio. But at age thirty-eight, slender with dark hair, he retained, almost intact, the coarse, jocular, one-of-the -boys st yle of his working-class-Hoboke n adolescence. It was't immaturity, just boyishness and irreverence, and he could restrain it when necessary. But it gave him a versatility of temperament that normally served him well in his main function as the vice president for administration, which was to know everything happening at the Columbia studio and keep it running smoothly. He wasn't a meticulous administrator, but he was savvy—as sensitive to the proclivities of clerks and janitors as to those of production vice presidents. Very little escaped his attention.
    Therefore, he was surprised and annoyed on the morning of Friday, June 3, when Lou Phillips presented him with the Cliff Robertson problem. As Phillips's predecessor as studio controller and more recently as his boss. Johnson had handled the occasional snafus that inevitably arose in the dispatch and receipt of tens of millions of dollars in checks of all sizes. But he had never seen anything like the Robertson inquiry.
    "Fuckin' weird." Johnson muttered as Phi llips watched him ex amine the file. "Somebody sure cashed the fuckin' thing. No doubt about that."
    Johnson and Phillips had never been close and Phillips was obsessively discreet in his conduct of studio business. So he didn't tell Johnson of Dick Caud illo's suspicion that David Bege lman had forged the check. He merely indicated that Cliff Robertson's people seemed intent on getting to the bottom of the matter. Still, Johnson' didn't have to be prompted to the possibility of embezz lement. He thought first of Bege lman's long -time secretary, Constance Danie lson, who had borrowed several thousand dollars from Columbia a couple of years earlier to make a down payment on a house. Jim had had qualms about the loan at the time, not because he didn't trust Connie but because the company normally didn't make loans to secretaries. But Connie had been with David Beg elman for more than a decade. Bege lman had brought her west with him when he had moved from the New York office of his talent agency to the Los Angeles office, and he had brought her with him to Columbia when he was made president of the studio in 1973. Thus, the loan had been approved as the exception to a rule. Could Connie later have mismanaged her finances and desperately needed money? Johnson doubted it, but it was conceivable.
    It was inconceivable, however, that Begelman himself had embezzled funds. Jim was very fond of David, who had always treated