The streaming network that wanted us to make the story of the Marigny killings gave us so much money that, when Jaya broke it down, we had enough beyond living expenses in our two contracts to get a start on the feature doc about Caroline Blackwood, the novelist, Guinness heir, and Lucian Freud divorcer that I’d wanted to do for the last two years.
“We have to do it,” Jaya told me. “This is how weird movies get born. You seed them with money from the normalish things you didn’t want to do. Plus, we can talk these people into distribution money up front for the Blackwood thing if they end up liking the show.”
“I hate this serial killer crap,” I said.
“These are killings that have nothing to do with you. Don’t get mad at what I’m about to tell you, okay?” she said. “This isn’t about Chuck Varner.”
It wasn’t okay and I did get mad. I yelled at her in the tiny office room of my apartment before calming down and apologizing, then admitting that she was right, even if she was an absolute bitch to have brought it up. We signed on to do the series the next week.
“It’s pronounced ‘Morris,’ ” Maurice said, but didn’t look that put out. It was getting more crowded around the food table, with audience members and execs alike passing their third drink and needing to lay down some absorbent grease and carbs before they started to slur. Some of the Treme sidewalk traffic had made its way in and toward the open bar, too, and on my and Jaya’s say-so earlier that evening, they were not being effed with by security.
“Oh, shit. How’s it spelled?”
“Uh, M-O-R-R-I-S.”
“Was I calling you that when we were working? The wrong thing?”
“Just a couple of times but it was unimportant, you know? I wasn’t going to interrupt you for that.”
“Next time interrupt the hell out of me, Morris,” I said. “I’m not big on disrespect on my projects, top-down especially. I’m sorry. And I’m looking forward to the next time.” At Jaya’s insistence, Morris loaded up a paper plate.
“Who’s the should-be-on-an-Australian-beach guy over there?” I asked Jaya, including Morris in my questioning glance. He shrugged. I was surprised I’d had to ask Jaya at all; I’d lived with her and her mom for half of high school and we’d been roommates for way too much of our twenties. She had a sharp sense of whenever I took an interest in a man, whether it was negative or positive. Morris backed into another conversation and Jaya set her plate with its delicious beans and frustrating spoon down. I resisted the urge to do a full visual sweep of the room, to make sure that everyone was all right, unhurt, still alive. Every time I indulged the fear was a setback, and I wouldn’t let myself cave twice in one night.
“No idea,” she said, looking at the man over my shoulder, then trying to wolf-whistle quietly through the gap in her front teeth. When we were teenagers she’d been able to do it perfectly, either factory-lunch-break loud or quiet enough just to get me and the rest of the kids sitting in back of Mrs. Stuart’s English 11 to laugh when she had Polanski’s Macbeth playing for us in the darkened classroom. But the gap had widened slightly in the past few years, by micrometers, and her tongue hadn’t quite gotten the hang of the new dimensions. What came out in the Carver lobby was a piffle of air and a shred of bean.
“Go ask his name,” Jaya said. “Maybe he’s press, or something.”
“Maybe he came in for the free AC and oysters.”
“Also likely.” We were both looking at him without bothering to cover it up—he was leaning against a wall near one of the entrances to the screening room itself, doing something with his phone, his eyes sometimes flicking toward me. I’d felt them on my back when I was talking to Jaya and Morris.
“He had a weird line,” I said.
“Like, creepy?”
“Sort of. Said he knew ‘who I really was,’ ” I said, twitching my index and middle fingers as quotes.
Jaya laughed. “Something he heard between poses in yoga class and thought would work. You don’t think it’s just a line?”
I looked at her. Jaya closed her eyes for a second.
“You have to stop with this, Blanche. Chuck Varner’s gone, no one thinks about him anymore, and no one you’ll ever meet who matters in your life or in your work will ever connect you to any of this shit.” Jaya was used to giving this talk and I was used to hearing it; not just hearing it, but needing it, ever since high school. She never got tired of telling me that Chuck was over for me. I kept trying to tell myself the same thing, but it was much harder to believe when I said it.
“It was just a line, Blanche. I do encourage you to be paranoid about any and every man being a scumbag, because it’s not an unsafe bet, but that was just a line. Right?”
“Yes. Fine, you’re right.”
“So prove it,” Jaya said, resuming her tangle with the beans, this time plucking them individually from the plate and crunching into them like french fries. She was fresh off a breakup with an editor named Cory Lutes, a really nice guy who eventually wanted more from her than half an evening per week. Every few months, Jaya or I pretended that we could have a functional relationship with a man and still have as much time with each other as we needed.
I walked over to the guy, making a stop at the bar for my third Old Grand-Dad bourbon, this one poured as heavy as the last two. When I reached him I plucked the phone out of his hands and looked at it.
“Whatcha doin’?” I asked. It was dark, on lockscreen. He hadn’t been using it at all.
“Research on what I could say to you that wouldn’t drive you away immediately this time. I want to talk to you.”
“About who I really, really am and what we’re really, really doing here?” I said. Programming Bruce and another exec, identically dressed in blue shirts tucked into whatever the upscale take on J. Crew chinos is, were making their way over to me, and I got ready to pivot—but there was no need. Jaya interposed herself and started talking to them, ushering them toward old Mrs. Bucknell, the eldest surviving relative of the Marigny victims. Ada Bucknell was the one who turned out to have been having an affair with the murderer, a brewery owner named Alec Mitchell. She didn’t know who she was fucking, as she put it to us bluntly after an hour and a half of interviewing at her dining table, a looming crucifix and ten picture frames on the wall behind her, eight of which contained images of her dead sister. “If I knew the demon he was I’d have cut him open while he slept,” she said. “Just cut him open and laid there next to him till the blood soaked all through the mattress and washed up around me.” When she’d said that, I thought of my father sleeping in the narrow bed in our trailer the night before the Harlow Mall shooting, and the little fixed-blade knife he’d gotten me for my sixth birthday. He’d encouraged me to sleep with it. In its sheath, of course. I thought of my small hands sheathing the knife in Chuck’s heart as Mrs. Bucknell had talked to us calmly of her sister’s murderer, and remembered why I hadn’t wanted to do this movie.
Mrs. Bucknell was drinking a Tom Collins, looking profoundly bored by the humble praise that Bruce and the other exec were giving her.
“Yeah, who you really are,” the man said, preventing me from finding out if Mrs. Bucknell would tell these two execs to fuck off, giving them a story that they’d tell back in the office repeatedly.
“I’m Blanche Potter, and I make documentaries. That’s me. You want to do some spiritual probing? I’m not into astrology, I don’t have a church, and I’m not successful enough to be a Buddhist or a Scientologist yet.” I was daring him to say it, to tell me I was right and that Jaya was wrong.
“You were lying to me by word three of that sentence. How am I going to believe the rest?” He held out his hand, and for a second I thought he wanted me to take it. Instead, I gave his phone back.
“And word three was? Sorry, my short-term memory is pretty bourboned tonight.”
“Potter.”
I could tell he enjoyed watching my face change, but not until later. Moments like that, I’m still ther
e, reacting, but also backing off, seeing it, logging the details for later.
He watched me recoil and then, before losing me, came in again. “I know your real name, and I know you’re from Stilford, and I know who your dad is. So that means I know more about the real you than anyone else in this room except for your intrepid Indo-American pal, right?”
“Fuck you,” I said.
He laughed, but not for me—for the people near enough to have heard me curse at him. He was spinning my “fuck” like it was the deadpan punch line to some anecdote. I wasn’t happy, definitely not, but I was satisfied. This was it. I was right. Jaya was wrong. Chuck Varner was here, and he would never leave. I thought about that sheathed knife again, how it used to feel nestled into my belt, just where Chuck Varner holstered his Beretta. I found my thumb grazing the spot, just at my right hip.
“You are just pals, right?”
“In high school they used to ask if Jaya and I were ‘dykes together.’ Try saying it that way. Has the benefit of frankness and makes it even clearer that the speaker is a moron.”
“Whoa, sorry. Look, my name’s Emil Chadwick, and I’m not here to pry unnecessarily or step on your life, Blanche. You want to go somewhere else? Get a drink?”
“With a blackmailer? Sounds fun.” As long as I could keep my tone up, could keep any tremble out of my face and any scream from spilling out, I could control this man. I had to believe that. I could control myself, and I could control this situation. I looked back at Jaya, who had moved away from Mrs. Bucknell and the execs, and was taking a second of peace, her jaw relaxed and eyes closing in a slow blink that showed how tired she was, how hard she’d been working.
“I’m not going to blackmail you. If you come with me and hear me out, that is. If you don’t, then there will be some information in circulation—” Emil made a swirling motion, taking in everyone in the lobby, all these people who were essential to my work and life “—that you will not want in circulation. I’m giving you an opportunity, Blanche Varner. A grasp on your own future. So, yes, I’m blackmailing you to sit down with me and listen to what I have to say, I suppose. That’s it.”
I held up a hand to him, then turned and went over to Jaya to tell her I’d text her as soon as I got to wherever I was going with this guy, and would continue to text her every ten minutes to tell her I was safe for the next hour. Nothing to worry about, I told her, and she grinned at me, happy I might be deciding to get laid.
“This is a perfect time for some casual whatever. You did such a good job onscreen that you could only mess things up by hanging around here and talking to the moneymen, anyway.”
“I’m just going to talk to him, no casual anything,” I said, waving and walking backward a couple of steps to alert Chadwick that I was on my way. I kept the quaver out of my voice. I hated hearing the name Emil Chadwick had said to me, in this beautiful lobby, in this cinema where we’d just screened a piece of my work that I was starting to realize was the best thing I’d ever made. I didn’t ever want to hear that name again, be called that name again, anywhere, but especially not here. I wanted him out, and that meant I was leaving, too.
“Wait,” Jaya said as Chadwick and I reached the doors of the Carver. We turned and she took a picture of us, Chadwick seeing what she was doing in time to smile. Jaya walked closer to us and took a close-up of him.
“I could get my agent to send a headshot,” he said.
“I’m just making sure that you know that I know what you look like, and that the cops will, too, if I don’t get answers back to my texts to Blanche tonight, mm-hmm?”
“Jaya, it’s fine,” I said, holding the door open. The humidity sucked at the AC around me.
“Fine by me,” Chadwick said. “Caution’s smart. Everyone likes smart.”
“I wasn’t looking for your approval,” Jaya said. She pointed at the snapshot on her phone, pointed at Emil’s face, and waved goodbye to me.
We cabbed to a place called the Fela Cafe, right back in Faubourg Marigny. The street was lush, even more than most in that city. Citrus fruits of some sort on the sidewalk, thick green leaves and vines on everything. Getting out of the car, we passed two assertive-walking girls wearing bras a size down, faces scared in that uniquely touristic way that I’d learned to shed my first month in LA. One of them looked at me and half-smiled. Chadwick emphatically didn’t check them out, keeping his eyes a half-foot above their heads.
“It’s safe here,” I said to them. “Have a fun night.”
CHAPTER TWO
* * *
BLANCHE,” CHADWICK SAID, as soon as we sat down at the bar. “You really do look like him. Better, of course. You should be in front of the camera more, you absolutely have a face for it. But you’re definitely Chuck Varner’s kid.”
It was cool inside and the bartender, who had both a neck tattoo and a bow tie, was close, two good reasons that I hadn’t chosen the courtyard just behind us. I was able to test bow tie’s listening skills right away, too.
“You call me that again and I’m out of here, got it?” Chadwick smiled and the bartender looked over at me, a quick eyebrows-up question that I answered with a nod and open-handed “it’s okay” gesture.
“How about every time I say ‘Blanche,’ you promise to mentally tag on your real last name, so you know what we’re really talking about.”
“You should have waited a few years if you wanted to blackmail me. I don’t have anything worth taking,” I said, scanning the cocktail menu and settling on something called a Kentucky Rain. Chadwick got a pint of Dixie. The drinks I’d had at the premiere had evaporated out of my bloodstream when Chadwick first used my father’s name, and I needed to replace them.
“You’re being modest,” Chadwick said. “There’s plenty you have that I’d like to take. Your profile, your skills, your future. And I don’t even want to take-take them—just borrow them for my own work.”
“Which is?”
“I write stuff.”
“Oh god,” I said, hating that I was starting to feel at ease, hating my hope that Chadwick was the kind of creep I was used to from the business, not the kind that only Chuck Varner had prepared me for.
“I’m not some sort of parasite or aspirant. I’ve got a book finished already, which I can tell you about—”
“Pass.”
“But I’m easing into your field, now. I want to produce a documentary that comes out right on the heels of a feature article, each feeding the other, unpacking a crime in the past and in the present.”
The cocktail arrived in front of me and was holy-shit good, strong and smooth and a reminder that I should stop pretending that I liked the cheap whiskey on ice that I’d been drinking for most of my adult life.
“You aren’t doing a very good job of not sounding like an amateur or a parasite, Emil.” I drew strength from insulting him, but it wasn’t enough. A hand raised to hail a server out in the courtyard looked like Chuck Varner’s in the way it pointed, lazily then with a sharp summoning twist, the way he used to signal me to run over to him at the end of a drill that I’d messed up. I looked down.
“I’m getting to the point. I want this to be about your dad. About Chuck Varner’s killing spree and its aftermath. My article will be about the shootings and what they predicted about our America, right now—I’ve already talked to an editor at The Atlantic, she’s interested—and the doc’s about the aftermath.”
“Someone already wrote the book on this. A pig named Jill Gudgeon.”
Chadwick’s cheeks pulled upward in a tiny flinch that he converted into a smile. His good looks didn’t sit on him well—the gym muscle, the tan, and the too-blue eyes, all were like features he was trying on for a few years before he could comfortably sink into soft, pale invisibility. “We both know Gudgeon didn’t get it right, though. Especially her writing on you. You come across a little—”
“Creepy. I know. All children who are half-smart come across as creepy when you write down what they say.”
“So Jill Gudgeon got your voice right?”
“Selectively, yes.” I was lying. Jill Gudgeon had gotten me exactly right. My memory, shaped by Chuck Varner’s drills on recall, concentration, and calculation, had kept my childhood alarmingly intact, and I remembered those talks with Jill Gudgeon. Her ghostly thinness moving through our trailer, in dresses that cost more than all of our furniture. The questions, delicate and subtle, that I eventually started to answer, only realizing how subtle she was being when my intelligence and experience caught up to her years afterward, when I read about myself in the book my mother had forbidden me from opening as long as I lived with her.
“So it’s accurate, but you still hate it?” Chadwick asked.
“Of course I hate it. It kept Chuck Varner alive when he would have just been another forgotten shooter.” Which is exactly what my mother hoped the book would do, exactly what she conned that smart Vassar-schooled writer into doing for her. “It glorified Chuck Varner, made him into some sort of avatar of working-class struggle turned to evil. White-trash Lenin with a rifle. He went from a couple of weeks in the news cycle to having his mug shot on T-shirts,” I said. Chuck would have loved the T-shirts; Crissy relished seeing them in the wild, said that their value as a teaching tool was incalculable. “Made him a folk hero to the right kind of loser. So a big no-thanks to all of this, Emil.”
“I’m with you,” Chadwick said. “You have to see that. I think Gudgeon’s book is trash, too, and of the worst kind. Pretentious, highbrow garbage, the kind that pretends to take a somber look at the American vileness that crime comes from so that liberal arts majors and society wives can tsk disapprovingly while they glory in the blood and poverty.”
Chadwick looked as smug as the book he was describing, but it didn’t make him wrong. “Borderline right-wing and definitely misogynistic take, but I get your point,” I said.
“If you’re hearing any misogyny here, I assure you that it’s just my feelings toward Jill Gudgeon that you’re picking up on, not your gender in general.”
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