* * * *
“Eighty thousand bucks!? No way. Now pay attention, Winston: this movie was financed up front, you understand?”
Shannon’s light voice was calm. “He means there’s no cash left to save it.” Shannon drove the big car deftly, though he’d raised the power seat so high that he needed blocks on the pedals. My own head hit the roof.
“I got important things ridin’ on this picture and it is now in the toilet and I am real unhappy, if you get me.”
“Suppose I made you happy.”
“And I don’t need your bullshit.”
Shannon’s voice was sharp: “Give him a chance, Alan. Go ahead, Winston.”
“I just got Simmons to refinance the shoot with his own money.”
Shannon kept his eyes on the road. “And why would he do that?”
“I held him up; threatened to reveal that he was writing those invoices.”
Greystoke stared up at me. “Howna hell you find that out?”
I pretended I hadn’t heard the question. “I told Simmons I’d go to the IRS if he didn’t come through. Of course he didn’t know I’d already made a deal with you to keep my mouth shut.”
Shannon said, “Yes, and what was our deal again exactly?”
“Exactly what I offered Simmons: I won’t volunteer anything about this.”
We rolled along in silence for a moment; then Greystoke nodded. “So what’s the story?”
“I think Simmons will come to you. He’ll say it’s to warn you about me, and then he’ll try to get that money out of you. But if you stonewall him, he’ll put your movie back in business, free of charge.”
“To what do we owe this favor?” Shannon’s tone was dry.
“No favor; I want to keep production going. I have two weeks’ pay to get plus twenty percent of the rest. That’s nearly six thousand bucks. And I still want my name on that picture. Which reminds me: How about letting me edit? I’m a good cutter and I know the film. I can do a faster job.”
Greystoke stared at me, then broke out a grin full of yellow teeth. “You know I halfway like you, Winston an’ you know why? You hustle. I can deal with you, understand?”
“Six weeks at union scale, okay?”
“Yeah. Right, Shannon, turn us around.” Without a pause, Shannon swerved onto the shoulder, wallowed through a half circle, and aimed the Lincoln back toward Calisher.
Greystoke was still grinning. “Back in business, huh? Well, well; lucka the Irish!” He was as Irish as Paddy’s penguin. “Hey! I almost fergot: lab did a rush job on that wet film. I dint believe it! Wall a water like the goddam Red Sea.”
“It was all right then?”
“Fantastic! Comes at ya like 3D.”
“And I figured out how to fit it in the story.”
He dismissed this nicety with a wave. “Whatever. Long as it’s in.”
“Too bad it doesn’t show Caudle drowning. Be a nice production value.”
Shannon raised an eyebrow but Greystoke remained oblivious. He burbled about his high-class movie all the way back to the motel.
* * * *
I was sitting in Molly’s trailer opposite a black woman with the dimensions of Mammy and the authority of Scarlet O’Hara. Mrs. Hildebrand was an investigator for the firm that had written the construction insurance on the Belle Haven Tract.
She consulted notes inked in a small, tight hand. “The skip loader was immediately below the hole in the dam. In clearing it, the crew found those sunglasses.” She pointed to the small heap of wreckage on the table.
“They’re Pits’ awright.” Molly still looked numb.
“Moreover, death was due to a heavy blow or blows. The body displayed multiple contusions and fractures, and there was no fluid in the lungs.”
I remembered that Pits’ lungs had been empty. “So you figure he opened a hole in the earth dam and then didn’t get out of the way.”
“That would be our position.”
“In any damage suits.”
A knowing smile, then Mrs. Hildebrand turned to Molly. “Why would he do such a thing, Mrs. Caudle?”
Molly looked at her resentfully. “Monk. Ms. Monk.”
“I see.” Her face said that irregular relationships were outside her professional venue.
Molly stared at the granny glasses as if trying to peer into the head that had worn them. “Maybe it was me an’... him.” She nodded in my direction.
“Ah.”
“We were uh, you know, an’ maybe Pits got mad. I mean, Stoney’s runnin’ that movie.”
Mrs. Hildebrand looked at me and I nodded. “I’m the production manager and Molly and I were involved, briefly.”
The investigator gathered her papers and the sunglasses. “In any case, our company has no liability for any damage occurring as a result of the flood.”
As she stood up, I stood with her: “And since Pits was a local resident and his action was unconnected with the film, neither do we.”
Mrs. Hildebrand did not rise to this bait. “Will you be here if we have any further questions?”
Molly shrugged.”No place else ta go.”
Mrs. Hildebrand nodded and, stepping as smartly as if she weighed one hundred pounds, marched out the little door and down the steps.
Molly went on staring at the table. “How could he be so dumb? Bustin’ a dam from the downhill side.” She shook her head in mournful disbelief.
I joined her on the salmon couch. “And where did he get that skip loader in the first place?”
“I dunno, sometimes they leave ‘em where they’re workin.’”
“But how’d he get it started?”
“Guess he coulda jumped it ‘specially an old one like that.” Molly stared into space as if imagining the event.
Time to change the subject. “Why’d you say that about us?”
She shook her head again. “I think maybe Dike ordered Pits to do it.”
“Why?”
“I surely don’t know. But if I told that lady and the Crossbones found out.... So I figgered if I gave her a different reason, she’d let it go.”
“Well, no harm done. But I’d still like to know why the Crossbones tried to sabotage the film.”
“No tellin.’ That Bull Dike’s a crazy man. I never trusted him.”
Silence.
“Would you like me to stick around a while?”
A wan smile. “You’re real sweet, Stoney. No, I guess I better think a spell - puzzle out what to do.”
“You have any money?”
“Are you kiddin’? But I got this trailer in my name - way Pits used ta ride when he got drunk, I made sure a that. An’ the ol’ pickup runs at least. I can always get work down ta Newhall.”
“I’m glad.” I stood up to go.
Molly rose as well. “One thing I’m good at is survivin.’”
“Oh I forgot: you don’t have to make the meals anymore. Simmons is hiring a cook.”
This time her smile was real, if wan. “I guess I oughta be relieved, but I’ll miss bein’ around all you movie stars.”
“We’ll be here a while.”
“Everthing’s ‘a while.’ Well, do me one favor, Stoney: just hang on a minute.”
Molly wrapped her arms around my neck, buried her face in my collar, and wept. I held her for several minutes, then sat her on the couch and got a Kleenex.
She waved me away, snuffling, so I kissed her head and left.
Chapter 17
Riding down the mountains through the chilly morning light in a ramshackle convoy of cars, vans, pickups, wheezing stake trucks, and a champagne Mercedes coupe driven by one very surly Kenneth Simmons.
His was the only sour face in the bunch. Alf and Lee were singing rowdy songs. Stogie, in his vintage Cadillac, chatted up the makeup girl and filled the car with smog. The sound man and woman bounced along happily in their four-wheeler, and the grips and juicers drove anything left that moved. As we rambled toward the Golden State Freeway, I picture
d our wagon train in helicopter shot, with Earl Scruggs picking Foggy Mountain Breakdown on the sound track.
We branched to the 405, rolled down to Westwood, and parked in a row on Wilshire while Simmons and I made a visit to his high-rise condo and the others explained to intrigued policemen what this raffish circus was 1doing on the upscale side of town. Then I returned with Simmons, the crew chiefs pocketed cash disbursed from his newly bulging briefcase, and the crews lit out for Hollywood like a Mongol horde.
Simmons and I paid for the ruined equipment, leaving a trail of grateful, sleazy renters, who would file insurance claims anyway and pocket our cash. But in my line of work, I might need their cordiality and credit on my next job - or the one after that.
By noon, the briefcase was nearly empty, the trucks were full of shiny new equipment, and our rustbucket convoy was steaming north again, afloat on optimism and beer, which the grips had included in their shopping list.
I propped a Coke on the Mercedes’ floor and unwrapped a Tommy’s double chiliburger, at which Simmons looked even more distressed, if possible. “Don’t spill that crap on my leather seat.”
“It does look like that, but it tastes great.”
“Nitrates, sodium, God knows what.”
“Bad for the leather’s circulation.”
“I told you, Winston, I despise your so-called jokes. You got to Greystoke, didn’t you?”
“Been working with him for a week.”
Simmons shook his head in disbelief. “I guess I never figured you.”
That oversight was mutual.
After five minutes of silence, Simmons said, “Now I’ve spent that money to replace everything, how do I know you won’t tell someone later?”
“Because Greystoke would take it personally, and his reactions tend toward intemperance.”
“But how can I be sure?”
“What can I say?”
Another pause and then, “There’s no point in my staying now.”
“Why don’t you take off this afternoon? I can handle the shoot and we’ll both feel better without each other’s company.”
He nodded grimly.
“And by the way, leave your furnishings. I believe they came out of the budget.”
Simmons flashed a look of barely suppressed rage, then concentrated on his driving.
* * * *
Insects buzzed around the quartz lights trained on a rented skip loader and the pile of dirt towering above it. We were shooting night-for-night to conceal the fact that this same skip loader had spent the day faking an earth fill dam in the Calisher dump. In the afternoon, we had bootlegged cover footage of the actual broken dam, and now we were staging its “destruction.” I would intercut tonight’s scenes with the footage of our flood, which had been shot in stormy light that would pass for darkness when the lab shifted the color balance toward blue.
Fueled by their first good dinner in three weeks, Diane and the crew were hustling to make up a day’s work in one three-hour session. “One more time, and Merl, don’t raise the scoop until you see the signal.”
The skip loader’s owner nodded amiably, since he’d been well paid from Simmons’s briefcase and was enjoying his debut in what he called “moom pitchers.”
In the retake, Merl bit a heroic chunk out of the dam in long shot. Then we moved the skip loader under a contraption that Stogie’d improvised with the offhand brilliance expected of senior grips. Thurston Fry retrieved his costume from Merl, stashed his specs and teeth, and climbed aboard the big yellow machine.
After three rehearsals, we rolled the camera and slated the scene. Thurston, in medium shot, pretended to drive the skip loader, working three levers and four pedals furiously, though without the dimmest idea of what they did. It didn’t matter because the camera was trucking up and back, up and back, in sync with Thurston’s movements. On the screen it was the loader that would appear to move, especially when I’d laid in engine sound effects.
Thurston was muttering into his stubble. “Sumbitches done me once too often.” He looked behind him, worked the levers, and the purposely shaky camera backed away. “Show ever guddam one a them.” Forward again to a bumpy stop. He yanked a lever viciously, then pretended to watch the off-screen scoop lifting. Thursty cackled maniacally.
I dropped my arm and at the signal, two grips atop Stogie’s off-camera rig opened a sluice gate. One thousand gallons of dirty water roared down the sluice, smashed into Thursty from above, and swept him off his seat and out of frame onto a pile of plastic covered mattresses.
“Cut! Superb, folks!”
Rising from the mattresses, Thursty did Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion: “Unusual wedda we’re havin’, ain’t it?”
Though the impersonation was expert, the roar of appreciation was for his scene.
* * * *
Midnight Mozart on Simmons’s radio, a soft amber glow from his tasteful lights, the gentle embrace of his pillowy couch - comforts over which Diane and I were now asserting eminent domain.
I savored the Jim Beam I’d laid on, since rum and Coke seemed jinxed. “I thought you might move in here.”
“Or we could share.”
“If it works out.”
Diane giggled. “It better this time. This is getting ridiculous.”
“How nice. I’ve never heard you do that.”
“What?”
“Giggle.”
“Haven’t felt much like it. But now I think we’ll finish the picture. Did you see the crew work tonight?”
“I told you Stogie could do it.”
“I never saw anyone move as slow as Stogie and still get so much done.”
A pause, during which I pictured a crackling fireplace on the blank wall.
“Stoney, why’d you come up here in the first place really?”
“Greystoke was worried about the picture. He didn’t like the dailies.”
“What was wrong with them?”
“Nothing whatever; he’s an amateur. You and I can spot the four minutes of movie in twenty of dailies, but he couldn’t.”
Diane’s tone acquired a slight edge. “So he did hire you to take over.”
I looked at the cozy room and the elegant person lounging beside me, still in flapping button-down shirt and shorts though she’d shucked her hiking boots and socks to reveal delicate, blue-veined feet.
I couldn’t quite suppress a sigh. “Yes, Greystoke sent me to take over.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“After ten minutes it was evident that you knew your business, so the best way to do my job was to help you do yours.”
“But you could have got a directing credit.”
“Aw hell: for years I’ve been trying to get a feature directing job and failed. But if I ever do succeed, it won’t be by stealing someone else’s picture.”
“Then you’re in the wrong industry.”
“The thought has occurred to me, yes.”
After another hole in this drab discourse, Diane said in a curious tone, “Well, I’m glad we had this little chat.”
Here it came: goodbye and good luck.
“Now are we going to get it on or what?” And she moved in until our noses almost touched. I kissed her mouth, the rest of her flowed forward, and we wrapped each other up in the delirious, time-honored tangle.
We submerged, came up for air, sipped our drinks, and sank again, cooing and chortling and humming in each other’s mouths. Her fingers were warm and dry and all the angles in her body somehow melted.
We found each other’s shirt buttons.”Wait a minute.”
“No, you wait.”
“We’re getting in each other’s way, Diane.”
“Ladies first.”
“No fair: you have two layers to my one.”
“Not tonight, I don’t.”
“Mmm, you smell good.”
“You too. Ivory soap.”
“It was on special.”
“Oops. Don’t fall off, Stoney.”<
br />
“Bed.”
“I’ll say!”
“No, bed. The bed. You know, queen-size?”
“Good thinking.”
* * * *
Diane sat upright with the sheet around her knees, tending her waterfall of hair and smiling to herself while I lay watching from somewhere inside a happy torpor. She put down her brush and started a thick single braid. Somehow this homely preoccupation was even more stimulating than her suave tan body. Without losing her grip on the braid, she doubled and quadrupled a rubber band and snapped it over the end. Then she bounced down on her back, pulled up the sheet, and grinned at me.
I was grinning too as I turned out the one remaining light.
* * * *
Chains rushed toward Scuzzy, split into Chains and Crabs, coalesced into Pits Caudle, then dissolved into an avalanche of greasy water with Bull Dike surfing down its face on his Harley. The water swept me into the warehouse set, clinging to my Arri which was somehow floating, then receded, sucking the light after it. In the blackness, the warehouse door clicked open.
Hmmh! What time was it? My digital watch said after three. Diane lay warm and still beside me and the room walls were invisible in the darkness, except for the faint gray rectangle of the bathroom doorway.
And the widening vertical bar that was the night outside the slowly opening room door. A clot of shadows slipped into the room and the bar of light narrowed to blackness.
Footsteps: slow and quiet, but not exactly stealthy.
I found the knob of Diane’s bare hip with my left hand and gave it four quick pushes. When she stirred, I pressed urgently again and her body tensed under the sheet.
Rustling. Silence. Then my corner of the sheet lifted.
“You gonna pig this whole bed?” and Molly’s well-fleshed haunch crowded my side.
I rose on my right elbow and found the switch on the bedside lamp.
Molly’s puppy face grinned up at me, above the two plump fists that held the sheet to her chin. She lowered the sheet slowly to her hips, as if revealing the payoff of a magic trick. The rustlings in the dark had been her clothes.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi. Good thing you climbed in this side.”
“How come?” She squirmed against me.
“Because my side’s full.” Diane’s tone was just slightly too measured.
Molly jackknifed up and gaped past my shoulder. “Well gawddamn!” She flipped the sheet and blanket to the foot of the bed.
A small, detached part of me could see a full shot from a camera’s point of view. On the right, Diane sat up, moved her arms toward shielding her breasts, paused, dropped her hands toward her lap, then frowned defiantly and put both fists on her hips. On the left, oblivious of her own exuberant flesh, Molly stared at Diane, then looked at me with eyes like lit fuses.