Quarry's cut q-4

by Max Allan Collins

  Then Castile patted Harry on the shoulder, smiled at the kid, and left.

  Harry came over to my booth and looked down at me. He wasn’t tall, but he was standing and I was sitting and he took advantage of that. He poked at the table with his belly, accusingly.

  “You one of the money guys?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “You one of the guys putting up the money for this piece of crap?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I’m a writer.”

  “What kind of a writer?”

  “I’m doing a story on the film. For Oui magazine.”

  “Oh. Don’t use my name in the fucking thing.”

  “I don’t know your name.”

  “Good. Keep it that way.”

  “Any special reason you want to stay anonymous, Harry?”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know my name.”

  “I don’t know anything except Harry, Harry. Sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

  Harry thought about it.

  “Hey kid,” he shouted, as though the kid were across the room and not just a few feet away. “Go get us some beers, huh?”

  The kid went.

  Harry sat across from me in the booth.

  “Sorry if I came on strong,” he said. “I’m a little pissed.”

  “About getting snowbound and stuck for no extra money.”

  “That’s right. It sucks.”

  That seemed to mean especially appropriate choice of words, but I didn’t say so. I said, “Don’t worry. I won’t mention you.”

  “Yeah, well thanks. See, I don’t want my name in any article because I’m union and this is a non-union picture.”

  “Do the unions care if you work on a film like this?”

  “Well. Not really. They aren’t strict on it. But they say not to use your real name on the production. And it would also hurt the work I do, the other work I do, I mean.”

  “Which is what?”

  “I work with an agency in Chicago. I do commercials, industrial films, straight stuff for straight people. If the people I work for found out I moonlighted doing occasional stuff like this, I’d get my ass in a sling.”

  The blond kid brought two beers.

  “It’s the same with Richie here,” Harry said. “He works for the same agency I work for. He’s a gaffer.”

  “Gaffer?”

  “You know, electrician, does the lights and stuff. Sit down, Richie.’’

  Richie sat down, on the same side of the booth as Harry, who said, “You wouldn’t want your name used in no article, would you, Richie?”

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind.”

  “You’d catch hell if they found out at the agency.”

  “Fuck the agency.” Richie’s voice was too young and highpitched for his words to convey any force. “I’d rather do real films, anyway.”

  “Shit. You call this crap real films?”

  “Jerry Castile is a real director.”

  I decided to get back in the conversation. I said, “I understand this is Castile’s last hardcore picture.”

  “That’s right,” Richie said “He’s going to be doing some very big things.”

  Harry shrugged, said, “That’s what he’s doing now, is filming big things,” and he swallowed some beer.

  Castile came back, looking irritated.

  “The phone’s out,” he said. “Goddamn storm’s worse than I thought.”

  He sat in the booth, on my side. Just us four boys, in one cozy booth.

  “I’ll be honest with you, Jack,” he said. “I was trying to call the Oui offices, to check you out.”

  I’d guessed as much.

  “Oh yeah?” I said.

  “Since I can’t get through, I’ll just have to assume you’re for real. But if you aren’t… if you’re with the police, and God knows we’re breaking various nonsensical bluenose local laws in shooting our film… you had best show me your warrant now, and be forewarned that anything you have done or do from here on out is going to constitute entrapment.”

  “Mr. Castile, I…”

  “Jerry. Please.”

  “Jerry. I’m just a writer. Not a cop. Not even close.”

  “Good. I’m just trying to be as up front with you as I possibly can. Now. Do you have a tape recorder with you or what? You don’t have a pad, I see.”

  “I’m not going to do any formal interviewing.”

  “Oh, what is it, then? A reaction piece? Your personal reactions to seeing what goes on on set of a porno flick, that sort of thing?”

  “Right. Behind-the-scenes look and all that.”

  “You didn’t bring a camera?”

  “I’m no photographer. Just a writer. I was hoping you’d be able to provide some stills.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Fine. You see, Mr. Castile… Jerry… this was very last minute. I got the call late this morning and just started out driving. By the time I got here the snow was getting out of hand, and I guess I’m stuck here like the rest of you.”

  Harry belched irritably. The blond kid, Richie, looked at Harry in a weird combination of admiration and embarrassment.

  Castile didn’t mind or anyway didn’t acknowledge Harry’s editorial comment. Instead he looked at me and said, “I don’t mean to hassle you, Jack, but I do need to be sure of you.”

  “I can understand that. I know about the pressures on people in your business these days.”

  “The fuck film business, you mean. Yes. Which is part of why I’m getting out. Going aboveground.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Hey, fuck films are a dead-end street. Artistically, commercially, every way. And it looks like we’re heading into a repressive period again, and people involved in making films like this are maybe going to be tossed in jail. So I’ve taken an offer from a major studio, and I’ll soon be into safer, more rewarding work. More rewarding in every sense of the word.”

  As he was saying this, the dark-haired young woman who had been hunched over the tape recorder in the adjacent room approached the booth and I got my first good look at her.

  She was wearing a dark blue long-sleeve sweater that was somewhat loose but clung nicely to her breasts, which were not large, but were there, bobbling provocatively; jeans clung nicely to the rest of her trim but shapely figure. She wore wire-frame glasses with huge round lenses that dwarfed her small, delicately featured face, giving her a little girl look. Her eyes were large and brown as her hair.

  She wasn’t as sexy as Castile’s wife, but she’d do.

  “I couldn’t help but overhear,” she said, “that we’re going to be stuck here overnight.”

  “Afraid so,” Castile said. “Would you call me a chauvinist if I asked you to check out the food situation?”

  The girl said, “Yes, but I’ll do it,” and smiled, and looked at me for the first time, and her smile fell.

  She’d just realized something that I had realized a few seconds before, when I got that first good look at her.

  We knew each other.

  17

  Her name was Janet Katz. Her father was Robert Katz, a dentist from Chicago, actually Elmhurst, and he kept a cottage at Twin Lakes, not far from my A-frame at Paradise Lake. Bob Katz was in his mid-fifties and, during the summer, was one of the group of men I occasionally played poker with. As far as he knew, I was a salesman, and on the road a lot. He knew me by the name I used at Paradise Lake, and so did his daughter. And she knew me another way, too.

  We spent a night together, at my A-frame, a few years ago. She’d just graduated from the University of Iowa-her father’s alma mater-with a degree in TV and Film, and a n aive assumption she was going to make it big. She was going to direct movies, she said. She was just visiting her folks, at their lake place, on her way to move in with a friend (whose sex she never specified) in Chicago, where she’d landed a job as a receptionist at a TV station, her hope be
ing to eventually get into the production area. And after a while she’d go out to California and make it big.

  But she hadn’t gone to California yet, apparently. If she had, she certainly hadn’t made it big. Otherwise she wouldn’t be here, doing the sound for a porno film.

  “This is Janet Stein,” Castile said. “Janet, this is Jack Murphy. He’s doing a story on the picture, for Oui magazine.”

  We exchanged brief, glazed glances. I made a shrug with my eyes and she tightened her mouth into a sort of smile and it was an agreement not to mention, in front of these people, that the both of us were using phony names.

  “Nice to meet you, Janet,” I said.

  “Same here,” she said, weakly.

  Weakly, that is, considering Janet Katz, no matter what name she was using, had a rich, baritone voice that wouldn’t sound weak on her death bed. It was one of those almost masculine voices that, paradoxically, can make a woman seem all the more feminine. Another woman I knew, named Lu, had a voice like that, and in the case of both women, I liked the effect.

  “I hope you won’t consider this a reflection on you, Janet,” I said, smiling, “but I suddenly realize I need to be led to a bathroom. How about directing me?”

  Janet smiled back, said she’d be glad to, and Castile, before getting out of the booth to let me by, suggested Janet show me to one of the rooms upstairs.

  “You’re as snowbound as the rest of us,” he told me, “so you might as well go ahead and check into this hotel. Each of the rooms has its own private bath.”

  I thanked him, and went with Janet, who led me across the central open area of the lodge, the snow-clogged skylight above us, to one of the stairways, where I followed her up to the second floor, into one of the rooms, its tan canvas shade already drawn.

  The room was what I expected: the side barnwood walls were decorated with abstract paintings in brown and white in metallic frames; the facing wall consisted of quadruple windows, with the center ones sliding glass doors leading out to a shallow balcony, a pattern common to all the rooms, I’d noted from the outside, with a few exceptions (the sunken living room and the bar and a few other first floor rooms). The windows were frosted over and it was cold in the room, thanks partially to all this glass, but then it was cold everywhere in the building, except under and around the glaring lights required by the filming, and once the filming was done and the lights shut down, I assumed the heat in the place would finally be turned on. In the center of the room was a rust-color couch that would, I suspected, convert to a double bed, like the one in my loft at home. The wall to the right included a door that stood open to reveal the first non-barnwood room I’d seen in the lodge: a sparkling white bathroom. On the right of the door to the bathroom was another door, a closet probably, and on the left was a built-in dresser, pine drawers built right into the barnwood. The ceiling was rather high, open-beamed, and made the room seem larger than it really was.

  She stood near the couch, leaning against it, fiddling with one of the arcs of brown hair that framed her pretty face.

  “How will this do?” she said, ambiguously.

  “Fine.”

  “My room’s next door.”

  “That’s fine, too.”

  “Do you really have to…” And she gestured toward the john.

  “Not any more. Seeing you turn up scared it out of me.”

  She smiled a little. First real smile I’d seen from her today. “I’ll show you my room.”

  She did. It was the same as mine, except the couch had already been converted to a bed. A sloppy, unmade bed, at the moment.

  “I’m always something of a slob,” she said, “when I don’t have a roommate.”

  She sat on the bed. So did I.

  “Maybe I can do something about that,” I said.

  She touched my face. Kissed me. Put her tongue in my mouth.

  “You could sleep in here,” she said, after coming up for air, “if you’d like.”

  “I’d like.”

  “We’ve got some catching up to do. How long has it been? Two years?”

  “About.”

  “You know, I’ve thought about you, Jack. Often.”

  Jack really was the first name she knew me by: it was the Murphy part of the name I was using here that made it phony to her.

  “I think about you, too,” I said.

  And I had, every time I played poker with her father, who had entrusted his daughter to me one evening, figuring I was a safe bet. I was, but he was betting the wrong way.

  “I probably shouldn’t believe you,” she said, stroking my face, “but I think I will.”

  “Well, why not? We did spend a… memorable evening together, after all.”

  “Yes. Memorable. Yes. Mmmm.”

  I’d just slid a hand under her sweater, touching a breast tentatively, its tip poking back at me, but I decided not to take the credit for that: the room was pretty cold.

  But I was warming up, so I played with her breasts for a while and she talked.

  “Are you really a writer, now? Is ‘Murphy’ a pseudonym? You can guess why I’m not using my real name. The experience is what I’m after, here, the chance to work with a director like Jerry Castile. He’s very good, you know, and getting well known, despite the subject matter of his work. Do that some more. Please. Anyway, this opportunity was just too good to pass up. Look. Let me take my glasses off. Yeah. There. Just put ’em over there, would you? Yeah. Thanks. Mmmm. Listen… my father didn’t find out about this, did he? He didn’t send you…”

  I cupped her chin in one hand. “That’s not nice.”

  “… what?”

  “It’s not nice to put your tongue in my mouth and tell me how you think about me and let me play with you while you ask if your father sent me to spy on you.”

  “I just thought…”

  “Don’t think. Don’t bother. I wasn’t sent by your father to spy on you. I’m not about to tell him or anybody I saw you here.”

  “Jack, I didn’t mean…”

  “Sure you did. But never mind. You owe me nothing, except the courtesy of keeping my real name to yourself. I have my reasons for not wanting it spread around.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  “Good,” I said.

  Of course she didn’t understand at all, but that probably hadn’t really occurred to her: she was just saying something to say something. And I hadn’t had time to make up an effective lie to cover my presence here, so I let it pass.

  “Now,” I said. “You want your glasses back?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Fine,” I said, and put my tongue in her mouth.

  18

  “Sorry I took so long,” I said, returning to my place across from Castile in the booth in the bar.

  “I got talking to Janet. Interesting girl.”

  “Well,” Castile said, with his practiced smile, “you must have the journalist’s knack for getting people to talk.”

  “Oh?”

  “Janet’s been very quiet, on and off the set. Also very efficient, very intelligent… but despite her efforts to seem unimpressed by all the naked flesh and sex-on-camera, I don’t believe she’s ever worked on anything like this before.”

  “She admitted as much, when we talked,” I said.

  “She certainly opened up to you in a way she hasn’t for any of us,” he said, and that was probably true. “Ah. Here she is now.”

  Janet came over; looking cool and pretty, and stood with her hands clasped in front of her, fig-leaf style, and gave her report on the food situation.

  “There are still plenty of cold cuts left,” she said. “And bread. And beer. But that’s it. There’s a pantry but it’s bare.”

  “We’ve been having our lunches here,” Castile explained to me, “and then having a late supper at a place up the road a ways. Great food. Wilma’s Welcome Inn, it’s called. That chili there is something else.”

  “Well,” the girl said, “it’ll
be cold cuts tonight. And beer.”

  “And bread,” Castile said, good-humoredly.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  The voice came from behind me, but I soon saw who it belonged to: Castile’s sex-star wife, who was wearing a green terry-cloth full-length robe, belted at the waist, with a white towel turbaned around her head. She wore no make-up at all, now, and the effect was startling: she was pretty, with a fresh quality, almost an innocence, that seemed incongruous with the image of her I had in mind, which was of her being humped from behind while cameras dispassionately rolled on.

  “Sit down, baby,” Castile said.

  Janet stood aside, so Castile’s wife could push through and sit next to him in the booth. Then Janet said she’d go off to the kitchen and make a platter of sandwiches for everybody, if Castile wanted her to, and he did, and she went.

  “Doesn’t she mind playing cook?” I asked.

  “When you’re shooting a picture with a crew this small,” he said, “everybody has to be ready to do just about anything. Fixing lunch is just one of the jobs that’s fallen to Janet. She’s been making the sandwiches every day we’ve been here and hasn’t complained yet. And that’s three days now.”

  “Brownie points,” his wife said.

  “Pardon me?” I asked.

  “She’s just trying to rack up some brownie points with Jerry. She’s as bad as that little nerd over there, what’s-his-name, that Richie. Both of ’em got visions of Hollywood in their empty little heads.”

  “Baby, you’re being a little harsh…”

  “Not at all. Realistic is all. I bet the little bitch’d take her clothes off in front of the camera if you asked her to.” She caught a glint of skepticism in my eye, and said, “You don’t think so, mister, uh, what was it?”

  “Murphy. And not mister… Jack. And no, I don’t think she’d take her clothes off on camera. Not and do the kind of things that’d be expected of her, anyway.”

  “And why not?”

  “She doesn’t seem the type.”

  “Who is? I’d still be running a beauty shop if I hadn’t done it.”

  “Why did you? Money?”

  “No, not money. The beauty shop was making money. I guess I got a little exhibitionist in me. I’m no whore, I’ll tell you that. I’m an actress. And there is a difference. Sure, I know what you’re thinking. I was screwing that guy, and was getting paid to do it. Now a whore will sometimes be something of an actress, I’ll admit, and can fool a guy into thinking he’s brought her off, that she’s really digging what he’s doing to her, what she’s doing to him. But how many of ’em could hump a turkey like that Frankie Waddsworthless on camera, on cue, on screen, and make it look like she’s enjoying it? Having the greatest goddamn climax since the Virgin Mary had the big wet dream?”