The Heart of a Stranger [antikvár]

Chapter IThe party at Roses' wasn't scheduled to start before ten o'clock, but I had nothing to do after dinner so I decided to get there early. My name is Allan Dallas, 1'm twenty-nine years old. You know, if you consider your life from segment to segment you have to realize that much of the sense of what you do is put in afterwards. That thought came to me while I was driving to the party. I went down Sunset toward the beach, where Walter and Judy Rose had just built their new home. Td just bought a new MG on time and I was exhilarated by the way it responded to me, like somé marvelously alive woman, while at the same time I was apprehensive about pay-ing for it. The payments were such that I could only continue them if I stayed in my new job, and the job was not merely a job but a way of life, a philosophical attitűdé that I didn't know if I would or could maintain for long. The sense of it all, I felt, would have to come later.Walter's house was on a street called Tiger Tail Road, off Sunset and then out past pitch-black desolation where his place stood as an oasis. Walter Jack Rose was his credit on the screen, a fairly familiar name as screen writers go. The party tonight was to celebrate the merger between Walter and Rod Fleischer to film a series of half-hour situation comedies featuring Rod and written and produced by Walter for TV.I fit in as story editor, a euphemism, I had just begun to see, for coffee boy, official fluffer-offer, and reader of all rejected manuscripts for the purpose of assuaging agents who submit-ted them and with whom Walter felt it necessary to maintain relations. I had known Rod when we were boys in Chicago; the story had it that we grew up together. This was a little wide of the truth but close enough to enable me to accept the post position that this heritage rated. He made pictures and was pretty much of a movie star and I had been acting as his stand-in for about a year.It was going to be somé party, and as I churned up toward the house I began to feel a mixture of disgust and excitement. The house was white colonial, two stories, behind a landscaped driveway. Walter had done well for many years and for the past three had been writer, creator, and associate producer of the Napoleon Jones movies, in which Rod had first captured