And in between, the naked, skinny, supine shambles of Stoney Winston, utterly nonplused.
Diane glared at Molly. “What is this?”
“Looks like yer gittin’ plenty, Stoney.”
Diane trained her sights on me. “Are you sleeping with her?”
Molly dropped a proprietary hand on my shoulder. “Ta hell bidness is it a yours?”
Diane gestured at the bed. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“Course he was, whadja think?” To me: “Weren’t you?”
“Ah...”
Molly flicked my shoulder with the back of her hand. “Shut yer mouth. Why shouldn’t he?”
“What are you doing in here?”
Molly looked disgusted. “Takin’ a shower; what’s it look like?”
“How about leaving?”
“Why me? This ain’t yer room, ‘cordin’ ta my books.”
“It damn well is; you’re gouging us two hundred a night for it.”
“I’m not. I just copy what Simmons gives me.”
“When you’re not poisoning people.”
“Folks....”
Molly ignored me. “Jest some bad meat. I never said I could cook none.”
“You made me lose a whole day.”
Molly’s smile was smug. “Yer jest pissed cause Stoney got ta direct.”
Diane grabbed my other shoulder. “You told her that?”
“I didn’t put it quite...”
“God damn it, Winston; I should have trusted my instincts.” Diane grabbed the sheet end from the foot of the bed and pulled it up to her waist.
Molly rotated onto her knees and thrust her pug face toward Diane. “Instinks, instinks...”
“Molly, this isn’t the time...”
“Don’t you tell me what ta do! You were usin’ me!”
Diane swung her legs off the bed and reached for her robe, which had also materialized. “Join the club.”
“You too, huh?”
She wrapped herself in the robe. “Doesn’t it look that way?”
Molly stared at her for several beats, and then her face softened. “I surely can believe you.” She too got up, collected her shorts, and stepped into them. “Only two kinds, ya know: ones like Pits, too goddam dumb to do what ya tell ‘em...” Molly zipped the shorts viciously. “An’ ones like him, smart enough to know just how ta play ya.” She leaned toward me, hands on hips. “Preoccupied!” She struggled into her puny T-shirt.
Diane stared down contemptuously from her edge of the bed. “He played me well enough.” She crossed her arms like a policeman.
Molly shook her head regretfully. “Well you think about this: you an’ I are different as cats an’ dogs; but the same damn game worked on both of us.”
Diane nodded.
Molly sighed. “Well.” A pause, and then she looked at Diane without anger. “I’m real sorry it’s spoiled.” She cocked her head meaningfully. “You take care now.”
Diane nodded grimly, and Molly marched out the door.
After a moment of deadly silence, Diane strode over to the couch, stripped off her robe, and started dressing. “I’ll say this for you, Stoney: you’re the most complicated bastard I’ve known.”
I joined her and began dressing. “Whatever you think, you owe me five minutes.”
“Why?”
“Review the last two weeks.”
“Holding that over me?”
“It’s up to you.”
She stared at the shirt in her hands. “All right.”
“I didn’t really respond to Molly, though she made herself very clear. Then the other day an old friend named Simmons went sour on me and you blistered me for grabbing your place when all I wanted was to keep your damn picture on schedule.”
Diane’s wry face acknowledged this.
“So at the end of the day, I drowned my sorrows for a while first in chenin blanc and then in Molly.”
Diane’s face softened, but I wasn’t looking for forgiveness.
“At the same time, I don’t regret one very pleasant, peaceful night with Molly and I don’t think that night threatened our relationship. You and I didn’t have a relationship then any more than we seem to have now.”
Diane seemed about to speak.
But it was still my dime. “I have a few choice words for Molly too.” I walked to the door. “Be back in a few minutes. If you’d care to wait, you can tell me how we play it from here on.”
Diane nodded, still staring down at her shirt.
Defiantly, I took a last look at her heartbreaking breasts; and when I’d savored this small blessing, I left.
* * * *
The trailer lights were still on when I knocked. “What?”
“Stoney. May I come in?”
A very long pause, and then Molly admitted me. “Whaddya want?”
“I want you to get me a glass of wine and come sit on the couch.”
“We’re through talkin.’”
“Not quite. You still have to tell me why you sabotaged the film.”
Molly froze; then shook her head. “You are jest the limit.” But she turned toward the refrigerator.
I sat on the couch and glanced around. Molly had removed all the biker icons and the trailer looked strangely bare.
“You were hanging around when Sean broke his leg, but I can’t prove anything there. I can’t prove you opened a can of exposed film either.”
“Cause I dint.” She handed me the wine.
“But you found the Arriflex where three other people had searched without spotting a great big pure-white camera case.”
A shrug. “I know the area.” She bounced down on the other end of the couch.
“Right after the generator died, you showed up to assure me that you’d been way up here making me a lunch.”
“I already confessed: I bought the damn sanwich.”
“You told me Crabs and Chains went in to Newhall hospital, so you talked to them after they tried to maim Scuzzy.”
“Only after.”
“And you went on and on about your lousy cooking so sorry about the food poisoning. But the supper and breakfast you made me were strangely delicious.”
Molly only shrugged.
“You made a big point of Pits being up the coast someplace, the night before the dam broke.”
“Only because you were so chicken about stayin’ here.”
“You talked to the insurance lady as if you knew what Pits was doing at the dam - driving an ‘old’ skip loader. And tonight you said he was too dumb to follow orders.”
“Not my orders.”
“Just one more thing: a few minutes ago, you said you only copied the charges Simmons gave you. But you told me the bills came from Dike. You knew all about Simmons and the rest of it from the start.”
Another shrug.”I explained everything.”
“No, you explained each thing; that’s not the same. One at a time, your answers hold up; but all together, they don’t account for the obvious pattern.”
This time she didn’t bother to shrug.
“I think you’d better talk to me, Molly.”
“Why should I?”
“So I can decide whether to tell the police.”
Molly hesitated, and when she spoke her tone was not as confident. “What’ll they find?”
“You’d be surprised, once I show them the pattern.”
“Then why not call ‘em?”
“Because what you did was small potatoes except for Sean’s leg and Pits. And after all, Pits killed himself; you didn’t do it.”
“Then what do you want?”
“To see that nothing else happens to this film. If I have to bring the law in to do that, I will. But if you explain yourself, I might not have to.”
“Why do you care?”
“I like you very much. Maybe if you hadn’t tried so hard and I hadn’t been so tight-assed, things might have been different.”
Her face pulled up into a sad smile.
r /> I took a sip of wine. “Tell me something: why were you so mad at me tonight? That doesn’t seem like you.”
Molly stared as if she simply couldn’t believe it.”How would you feel if you come sneakin’ inta somebody’s bed an’ found they was already preoccupied? I was mad ‘cause I felt like such a damn fool, is all.”
Molly looked at her glass, sipped, looked again, rotating it in plump fingers. “Okay, it’s real simple. Pits an’ Dike were up for president and Dike won. I mean, he bought it, understand? Pits shoulda had it - been workin’ fer the club fer years. But ol Dike come on mister big an’ throwed his weight around an’ money too, an’ he stole it away.”
“Then Dike thought up this movie to, uh, take care of some money, an’ he just gave two million of the club’s cash ta Greystoke. So I thought, what would the bros do ta Dike if he never got their money back?”
“Because the film shut down before Greystoke paid it.”
“Uh-huh. I figgered a little push here and a little shove there and you folks would give it up.”
“And the Crossbones would choose a new president.”
‘“At’s it.” She looked me straight in the eye. “I never meant nothin’ serious.”
“I believe that; but why take the trouble? You didn’t even like Pits.”
Her voice was full of bitter pride. “You ast me why I stayed with him. I ran him. No matter how he treated me in public, he done what I told him. If he won the election, then I got ta be the real president. Anything wrong with that?”
“Why did you want to run the Crossbones?”
“Five thousand members and three million bucks is why. Maybe no big deal ta rich movie folks like you, but not too bad for an Okie kid.”
“Not bad at all. Will you lay off the film now?”
A nod. “I promise.” She looked at me again. “No hard feelin’s?”
“No. And we’ll keep this in the family.” I rose and walked to the door.
Molly looked at me out of the wise old eyes in her round baby face. “You go on back to yer movie, cause that’s what yer really in love with. But you mind me: a movie don’t feel ya inside it, and it can’t love ya back.”
* * * *
Diane still sat on Simmons’s couch, still with her shirt in her hands, as if she hadn’t stirred in twenty minutes.
I sat down beside her. “The sabotage is over. It was Molly.”
A quiet moment, and when Diane raised her eyes, she didn’t seem to be thinking about Molly at all.
Chapter 18
Six weeks was a short time to edit a feature, but I knew the footage by heart, and there wasn’t all that much of it, since Diane had shot so economically. My slapdash script had worked somehow, and the film wasn’t exactly hurt by an almost lethal brawl and a spectacular flood. The film lab, which knew our credit rating to the penny, couldn’t figure out how we’d done it, and the picture’s reputation was already snaking through the Industry grapevine.
The natives stayed pacific up in Calisher, perhaps because Bull Dike had disappeared from his airstrip hideout - courtesy, I hoped, of his Colombian connection. During our last week of shooting, Molly sold the trailer and vanished. I’d warned her that things would soon get nasty, so I had no doubt that “Molly Caudle” had been shed like a snake’s skin and the original Bullhead Alice Monk was on the road somewhere in Pits’ old pickup. Vaya con Dios.
Greystoke had been cooperative, except to demand a thousand changes in the film, all of which I’d promised but not made. He never noticed.
Each morning, Diane and I had Bumbled downhill from my flat in Laurel Canyon to slave twelve hours over a hot Moviola. The collaboration had been smooth and the relationship as peaceful as our cactus personalities allowed.
And now I was sitting under pin spot down-lights, behind a console bristling with knobs and sliding gain controls, dubbing down the last reel of Megaton, formerly Cycles from Hell.
The portly sound technician repaved his bald crown with side-hair that the air conditioning persisted in displacing and lit his fourteenth Marlboro. He zeroed the huge footage counter beside the screen and rolled the final reel. The counter, projector, eight tracks, and a background sound loop all rumbled forward in lockstep.
For the next seven minutes he watched the screen with total concentration, dialing tracks up and down, following the footage counts I’d penciled onto long dubbing sheets, one for each track.
On the screen, Scuzzy rode his Harley up a hill toward the camera, stopped in the foreground, and turned to look behind him.
Far off at the bottom of the rise, Hallie Sykes struggled with the flood debris in her yard - all carefully placed by the property master.
Scuzzy watched her without expression.
Hallie finished her chore and disappeared inside.
Scuzzy’s face underwent a subtle transformation, and then he spoke his only ad lib in the picture: “As long as a man talks excessively with women, he brings evil down upon him.” He looked away.
The sound man scanned the dubbing sheet. “Why so much background there?”
I chuckled. “Had to clip the line. He originally added, ‘Rabbi Yose Ben Johanan.’” But, always a pro, Scuzzy had first turned his mouth off-camera.
Scuzzy revved the Harley more aggressively than necessary, roared out of frame...
... and dwindled down the snaky mountain road toward the next valley.
“No music here?”
“No, just FX.” The Harley’s throaty rumble dwindled too, and after a long-held shot, Scuzzy and his thunder disappeared. A moving line of crayon marked the fadeout, and then white end titles crawled silently up the black screen. I leaned toward the sound technician. “No sound under the titles. Want another run-through?”
He shook his head, depositing an inch of dead Marlboro on his console. “Let’s lay one down.” He reached for the intercom switch to order the reels reset.
“Hold it!” Greystoke’s rasping tenor made me jump. He’d come in unnoticed. “Who the hell is Spencer Winston?”
“That’s me, Alan; Stoney’s only a nickname.”
Greystoke poked an accusing finger at the title just crawling off the top of the screen. “Screenplay by Spencer Winston? Ta hell happened to me?”
“I wrote a new screenplay; didn’t you notice?”
“And who gave you permission?”
“You did. Watch the rest of the titles.”
Shannon cut off Greystoke’s protest. “He’s right, Alan; it’s a different movie.”
Fortunately, the titles were ending, and
Produced by Alan Greystoke
rolled past, and then
A GREYSTOKE PRODUCTION
crawled up to center screen, held for five seconds, and faded to black.
“You get the last two credits, Alan, and bigger type than anybody.”
“I dint approve that, understand?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“Well... I’ll let it go. Cost too much to change, get me?” Greystoke sketched a magnanimous gesture in the air and changed the subject. “Got some news: Corona Films signed to distribute: five hunnert prints to start.”
“Congratulations.”
“They want a summer release, okay?”
“The negative’s half cut and we’re locking up the track today.”
“Big ad campaign too. Hey: too bad you didn’t keep yer points. Coulda cleaned up.”
Reflecting that Delmore Wong of the IRS was poised to do some cleanup of his own, I didn’t regret my loss of profit points. I only hoped the film would get out before Greystoke’s taxes did.
Which reminded me: “You know, Alan, we should make a videotape copy.”
“What for?”
“For you, to show your friends at home.”
Greystoke thought, then beamed. “Hey, yeah; we got that machine, right? Yeah, go ahead; I like that.”
And with Greystoke footing the bill, Diane, Scuzzy and I could get cassettes of our work to
show.
Greystoke turned to go. “Okay, wrap it up. Come see me tomorra for your last check.” And our new-fledged mogul swept out.
Shannon, however, remained. “We need to talk, Winston.”
“In the lounge.”
We stepped into the dreary waiting room next door and Shannon leaned against a table. “When do you drop the other shoe?”
“What shoe?”
“Come on. You think you have a hold on us. How do you plan to use it now?”
“Shannon, I have my money and my screen credit; I want nothing more to do with you.”
He looked at me appraisingly, then evidently decided I was telling the truth. His head shake was full of pity. “You’re a small-timer, Winston, and you always will be.”
“In your game, yes; but I’m not in your game.”
He shook his head again. “Everybody’s in my game, Winston; didn’t you notice?”
Shannon went the way of Greystoke, leaving me with the sour fear that he might be right, at that.
* * * *
I was parked with Diane in Beetle Bumble, chided by airport recordings: the red zone... is for loading... and unloading... of passengers only.
Diane discovered, for the sixteenth time, that her ticket was still there. “Don’t come in, Stoney. I hate departure gate goodbyes.”
“When will you be back?”
“Supposed to be a two month shooting schedule, but we’ve got exteriors in Pennsylvania.”
“Where it rains in summer. I remember rain.”
“You ought to try the East; learn all about weather.”
“Thank you, no; I grew up swimming in it. I’m glad about your new film, though.”
“When you’re hot, you’re hot.” But her tone was rueful.
“It’s been fun working with you.”
“Don’t say it in that past tense way.”
“It wasn’t meant like that.”
“I know.”
Diane looked at me as if she wanted to say something, but instead, she checked her ticket again. “Time to go.”
We embraced silently and then retrieved her luggage from the Beetle’s nooks and crannies. A last quick peck, as if she were just off to work for the day; then Diane disappeared into the terminal with lanky, elegant strides.
She didn’t look back.
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