Who is Charlie Conti? Read Free Page B

said, it made me feel pretty sad, so I asked Martin if we could go and he said that was fine with him. I think he was kind of down himself.
    That was the last time I saw Izzy. Martin and I drove back to New York that night and two weeks later the trustees signed my mother’s estate over to me, on the condition that I pledged tolook after Izzy as her legal guardian. I mean, the trustees had set up a separate fund for her and all that, but someone still had to go check on her sometimes. Boy, did I sign a load of papers last summer. Then, a month later, I was accepted by the Hollywood School of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles, so I found a realtor to sell the apartment in New York and I moved to LA. That summer barbecue party had taken place almost a year before, but as I sat in the diner fifty miles south of Vegas I thought how I wanted to see Izzy more than anything else in the world. That’s why I’d left LA a couple of days before, and it’s why I was headed east. That’s also why it was convenient for me to meet Special Agent Kramer in the diner off of Interstate 15.

III
    T HE ESTATE GOT signed over to me on my eighteenth birthday. I guess I always knew I was going to be very rich but still it was weird the way it happened, just like that. And it’s also pretty weird to have so much money and not know what to do with it. I guess most kids would have gone crazy and thrown a few parties and stuff, but to tell the truth I wouldn’t have known who to invite. I’d kind of lost touch with everyone I knew from Belmont. I’d even lost touch with Mikey – he’d been my best friend at Belmont. After that, I guess I became a bit of a loner. I mean, if you live with your own tutor and housekeeper and cook you don’t really feel like inviting anyone back to your apartment. I guess I just didn’t want to stick out any more than I already did. And that’s another thing – I wasn’t into the same kind of stuff as the other guys I knew. Forexample, they used to dress up in business suits that were too big for them, in the hope of maybe getting let into a nightclub. I never did that. So even if I had wanted to throw a party when the estate got signed over, there wasn’t really anyone I wanted to invite. I guess I could have thrown it just for myself and Martin, before he left. That would have been fun.
    In any case, most of the money was pretty tied up in stocks and the rights from mom’s early vocal recordings, before she made it big in the movies. But the best thing about the estate getting signed over was that the trustees couldn’t tell me what to do anymore. They were meant to keep on advising me, but their advice was pretty predictable and anyway I didn’t have to take it. Right after the estate got signed over I agreed to go to lunch with Mr Hartfelder, the senior trustee. Big mistake.
    Mr Hartfelder came to pick me up in this shiny green sports car, some old time British race car. It was pretty slick on the inside, all polished wood and leather. It really was a nice car, I’m not pretending it wasn’t. The problem was, Mr Hartfelder was just too proud of the damn thing. First thing he said to me was:
    ‘Hiya Charlie. Good to see ya. I bet you’re wondering where I got these wheels.’
    ‘Yes sir, I am,’ I replied, though I couldn’t have cared less.
    ‘Sure you are, Charlie. Sure you are. Bought it at the Christie’s auction. Just got it shipped over from old Blighty.’
    Man, the guy was a terrible fake. He might have spent a semester at Oxford – I think that’s what he told me – but he thought he was the goddamn Prince of Wales.
    ‘Just imagine what a good-looking kid like yourself could dowith a car like this. Chicks wouldn’t leave you alone, eh?’ Old Hartfelder looked across at me and made a kind of clucking noise with his cheek. I hate it when old people talk about sex. At least, I guess it’s ok if they talk about themselves and sex – though I’m not too crazy about that either – but I