Another thing we discussed was what he’d been doing to protect himself.
“I’m carrying a gun,” he explained.
“Where?” I asked. Even in the dim light cast by the TV screen, it was apparent he wasn’t concealing a weapon in an outfit that still consisted of a sweatshirt with the word DIRECTOR on it and jeans, same as he’d been wearing when we met hours before.
“It’s in my suitcase,” he said, sheepishly. “I know what you’re thinking… lot of good it’s doing me there. I can see it now, me saying, ‘Excuse me, while I go get my gun out of my suitcase.’”
“Not at all. You can’t go around with a gun on you while you’re working on the film set. You wouldn’t need it, anyway.”
“Are you armed?”
“I left my gun outside.”
“Shouldn’t you get it?”
“Nothing’s going to happen tonight.”
“How can you know that?”
“Hey, I been through this with you before, Castile. Pay attention: we’re snowbound here, and unless Turner and his partner want to kill everybody in the place, you should be safe. And I can’t see Turner or any pro doing that.”
“He could sneak in during the night and then leave.”
“Then we’d be snowbound with a corpse and we’d all have to stick around while the authorities looked into it.”
“Why would that matter to this Turner?”
“Because he’d be leaving his partner behind. As a suspect. I’m not saying we shouldn’t take precautions. Turner’s an idiot, and he might try to fake your death to look like an accident or something.”
“Jesus. What can we do?”
“Wait a minute…”
“What…?”
Footsteps were echoing in the nearby open shaft area, and I put my hand up to silence Castile.
“Jack…?” The voice was Janet’s.
She was wearing a robe, a thin flowered robe that obscured her good figure, and she didn’t have her glasses on; she looked sleepy, as if she’d just woke up. Or somebody woke her up.
“Can I talk to you a moment, Jack?”
“Sure. Excuse me, Castile.”
I took Janet by the arm and walked her into the adjacent room, another living room area, where we stood in the darkness and spoke.
“I’m afraid,” she said.
“What?”
“Afraid. I don’t know why, exactly. I just woke up and was afraid.”
“What woke you?”
“I thought I heard voices.”
“Castile and I were talking.”
“I don’t think you’re what I heard. I know, I know, I’m only one level up from here, and the rooms are sort of open… but I don’t think you’re who I heard. The sound came from above.”
“Are some of the others sleeping on the upper floors?”
“Yes.”
“Then that’s what it was. Somebody upstairs from you, talking.”
“Maybe I dreamed it. It sounded like… arguing.”
“Maybe it was. Harry and Richie and Waddsworth have a little triangle going, I understand.”
“I’ve noticed. So it was them, maybe.”
“Maybe. Probably.”
“Fine, but I’m scared. I woke up alone and was scared, that’s all. I expected you to be there. You said you’d be coming up.”
“It’s only been an hour or so since you went up, kiddo. I’ll be up soon.”
“Okay. I’m sorry to be a baby.” She gave me a kiss. A nice one. Just a little bit of tongue, this time, teasing.
“I’ll be up,” I said.
She touched me.
“You’re up now,” she said.
“You’re not scared, you’re just horny.”
“Maybe that’s it,” she said, and I could sense, if not entirely see in the unlit room, her pretty smile.
“Shoo,” I said.
She let go of my hand, slowly, and drifted reluctantly off, disappearing into the dark.
I rejoined Castile.
“What was that all about?” he said.
“She was just wondering when I was going to come up.”
“I see. Is there any possibility…”
“That she isn’t the sweet child she seems to be? Sure. I told you before: there are women in Turner’s business.”
“You don’t think she’s been listening or anything…”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I don’t know.”
“Are you sleeping with her tonight?”
“I’ll be in the same bed. I’m not going to be getting any more sleep tonight than you, though. Where’s your room, anyway?”
“Not near Janet’s. It’s on the third floor.”
“I’ll move Janet and me next door to you and your wife. How’ll that be?”
“That’ll be fine with me. Is that one of the precautions you were talking about taking?”
“Yes.”
“What will you tell Janet?”
“I don’t know yet, something. But we’ll be next door. Count on that. How much does your wife know about all this?”
“Well… she knows I was involved with those slasher films, as middleman… and about the three o’clock phone call from the guy saying he… but I never told her about the relationship between the slasher films and that guy, his daughter… I just didn’t think Millie could handle that. All she thinks is that my life was threatened, and that I’ve been acting very paranoid since. Jesus. I’m scared. Really scared.”
“That’s what Janet said. That she was scared.”
“She did? Why, I wonder?”
“I don’t know. She had a bad dream, I think. She thought she heard something.”
And then, like punctuation to what I’d said, something landed heavily, thuddingly, out in the open area of the building, the central shaft area, a whump sound with overtones of brittle breaking sounds, like a bag of laundry that had been heaved onto the cement, only somebody had left something breakable in some of the coat and pants pockets, something made of china perhaps, some things that would shatter when hitting the cement…
I held Castile back with an arm, reached over with my free hand and flicked on a small lamp on an end table.
There was a naked body in the center of the floor, out in the open area. Oh, not exactly in the center, maybe, but close. The body was that of a man, and he’d hit face down, but twisting as he did, so that the trunk of him was visible, and there was no mistaking who it was.
Frankie Waddsworth, superstar of porn, wouldn’t have to sweat getting it up, anymore.
24
“Jesus,” Castile said.
I was kneeling next to the body. Castile was keeping his distance, though he was close enough for us to be able to speak in hushed tones. The only light was from the one lamp in the room where we’d been talking, and it made Castile cast a long, irregular shadow, helping make the already eerie, absurd situation all the more unsettling.
“So much for my nothing’s-going-to-happen-tonight theory,” I said.
“How can you… touch him?”
I was examining the body.
“Well I’m not getting a kick out of it,” I said. “But it’s not going to kill me, either.”
“You have such a soothing way of putting things,” he said.
“Thanks.”
I could find no wounds of any kind-bullet or knife or anything else, although if he’d been killed, say, with a long narrow needle or something, the wound wouldn’t be readily visible, particularly in this lousy light. One thing was obvious enough: his neck was broken; he’d landed on it, after apparently having fallen the entire four floors.
“Who’s sleeping on the upper floor?”
“Just Waddsworth… was. I believe.”
“Well he’s sleeping downstairs tonight.”
“You don’t think this is… your Turner’s work? Do you?”
“Maybe. Probably. Janet said she heard arguing. Maybe this is the aftermath of a quarrel up a
t the fag convention upstairs. I don’t know.”
Castile touched his throat, like he just heard Dracula was in town. “Then Turner could be inside the lodge… right now.”
“He could be. Or his partner could’ve done this. Or Waddsworth could’ve slipped and fell.”
“You don’t really believe this could be an accident.”
“I don’t believe anything except that this sucker’s dead as they come, and he could be starting a trend.”
“My God.”
I stood and joined Castile and we both cast long shadows on Waddsworth.
“We’re not telling anybody about this,” I said. “Somebody in the lodge already knows, of course… whoever pushed Waddsworth, that is… and that somebody’ll expect us to wake everybody up and start hollering and everything. We won’t do that.”
“We won’t?”
“No. We won’t do anything that’s expected of us. Whoever is responsible for this has thrown me off balance… and I’d like to do the same back at him.”
“The poor son of a bitch.”
“Who?”
“Waddsworth.”
“Oh. Yeah. Sure. Anyway, let’s go ahead and search the place and see if we can find Turner.”
“Then you do think he’s in the lodge?”
“He could be. But it’s a good idea to batten down the hatches anyway, right? You want to get that gun of yours?”
“All right.”
“And tell your wife you’re switching rooms. Take another room on the same floor, but get out of that room you’re in now.”
“What excuse’ll I give her?”
“Tell her there’s a draft in the room. Tell her anything. But don’t tell her about Waddsworth. We’ll save that little surprise for morning… if we make it to morning.”
“Jesus.”
“Go on. Get the gun. We’ll search the place together.”
He nodded, and headed toward the stairs. He glanced back once, at the naked dead figure sprawled on the rust-color shag carpet, and shuddered and went on.
25
We searched the lodge and didn’t find Turner. Of course he could’ve been hiding in somebody’s room, specifically the somebody who was in this with him. But all of the rooms that were supposed to be empty were empty, as was the basement, which was nothing but cement walls and floor and a big furnace.
And so I sent Castile off to bed, to the room he’d moved himself and his wife to, just a few doors down from their old room, which I intended to sleep in. Or rather to not sleep in. To wait in, for Turner and/or somebody else to come dropping in to see Castile.
I had a good idea who that somebody was, too. I hadn’t told Castile, as I always like to keep some information to myself, to stay in control of things; but based upon the description Turner had given, under the gun, of his partner Burden (“Short guy, balding, on the heavy side… late forties, early fifties”), Harry the fat cameraman was it.
I’d thought about going after my nine-millimeter, but had decided against it. It would mean going outside, in the dark, and that would be putting myself on a platter for Turner. And I didn’t want to go waving a gun around in here: I was, after all, a writer for Oui magazine, as far as everybody but Castile was concerned, and it was a cover I didn’t want blown. Now that there had been a death there would be a certain amount of investigation by the sheriff’s office and it would be very difficult for me to fade into the background of that investigation once I’d gone waving an automatic around. So for the time being, the gun stayed hidden out in the tool chest in the shed.
Since I intended staying awake all night, I shouldn’t have any trouble, no matter who came calling. All I had to do was flick on a light before I got mistaken for Castile and killed; it was that simple. If it was Turner, he’d want to find out what the hell I was doing here, before he did anything else; if it was Turner’s partner, which is to say Harry, in all probability, he’d be confused seeing someone besides Castile and wife in that particular room, and while he was confused I could either talk or act.
So there was little immediate danger, which is one reason I decided to keep my commitment to Janet to spend the night with her. It was easier keeping my date with her than explaining my way out of it, and gave me the chance to keep a protective eye on her.
So I changed the sheets on the bed and otherwise made the room look like no one had been using it; Castile and his wife had taken their luggage with them, and that helped. It was my hope that Janet wouldn’t have paid any special attention to which room the Castiles had been sharing and would think this was simply another vacant room in the big lodge, especially since she’d be somewhat groggy from having already been asleep and wakened to move through the darkness of the place under my direction.
And it worked. I went in and woke her and told her to come with me, and led her into what used to be the Castiles’ room and got almost no complaint from her. Almost. She did question me as to why we were moving at all, which I expected her to, since she already had a perfectly good and identical room, as did I, but when I told her I changed because I liked the view, she bought it. There really was a view: the heat in the lodge was working well enough to defrost the windows a bit, and it had stopped snowing out there sometime during my long conversation with Castile, and the temperature was apparently rising somewhat, too.
At any rate, there was a view: the room faced the slope covered with trees, with that winding drive, and the farmhouse at the bottom, over to the left, where I had stowed my car in the barn. Of course I couldn’t see the farmhouse, but I could see something that might have been smoke coming from that direction. Smoke coming from the chimney of the farmhouse?
But I didn’t look at the view. Not for long. I got in the sack and quickly made what must have seemed like passionate love to Janet, but which was in reality the most paranoid sexual act I have committed since masturbating in an unlocked bathroom in my aunt’s house at age thirteen. It’s difficult to screw and look over your shoulder at the same time, but that’s about what the situation was: at any given moment, somebody might be coming through that unlocked door looking to kill Castile, and here I was in Castile’s room, in his bed, screwing instead of paying attention to not getting killed.
Anyway, it made for another memorable lovemaking session with Janet, if not a particularly enjoyable one, though I’m sure she liked it: it was a frenzied enough act to qualify as the sort of rape-with-permission that a lot of women seem to like.
“Oh Jack,” she said, cuddling to me, as I sat in bed, leaning back against the headboard, staring at the doorway in the near dark (I’d left a light on in the john, left the door open a crack). “I didn’t know it could be like this.”
“Me either.”
“I’m sorry I offended you before.”
“Huh?”
“When I accused you of… spying on me… for my father.”
“That’s okay.”
“I really have thought of you. Often. Well. Not often maybe. But I’ve thought of you.”
“I know, Janet.”
“I wish…”
“What?”
“I wish we had a chance to get to know each other better.”
“Janet, there was the three times that night at my place, and then there was this afternoon, and just now… how much better can we get to know each other, anyway?”
“You’re still mad at me. I can tell.”
“No. No I’m not.”
“Well you seem a little edgy.”
“I do at that.”
“Otherwise you wouldn’t say things like you said.”
“What things?”
“Implying our relationship isn’t anything but sexual.”
“Oh.’’
“I just don’t think you’re that kind of person.”
“What kind of person is that?”
“Who thinks of a woman… of me… as a mere sex object. The kind of person that this silly film we’re making here is made for.”
“I thought you liked the film.”
“I like working on it. There’s a difference.”
‘‘Oh.”
“I hate the film. But I like working with Castile. He’s a real film-maker, and he’ll go on to better things… much better. I’m just being an opportunist, in trying to get in good with him and maybe work on his next film. The one for American International.”
“I kind of guessed that.”
“You think I’m just a shallow little girl, don’t you? An opportunistic little bitch? Maybe I am just a sex object to you… maybe I am just a… cunt.”
Her voice was trembling and I had a hunch the tears were not far behind, so I touched her face and said, “Don’t say that. It’s not true.”
And that did the trick. Despite the semidarkness, her smile was radiant. She snuggled up to me and said, “You can use me as a sex object, if you like. But someday we’ll get to know each other better. I just know we will.”
Frankly, I wouldn’t have minded that at all. She was flaky, yes, but she was as intelligent as she was pretty and was pleasant to be around. There was something appealing about the combination of career girl and sweet kid, opportunist and innocent, and I wouldn’t have minded spending some time with her some place else but here, in this goddamn lodge, a naked corpse downstairs and at least one killer running around the halls out there.
“Can I tell you the truth about something?” she asked.
“Okay.”
“You’re the first… you know, older guy I ever made it with.”
“Older?”
“Yeah, I know… you’re only, what? Thirty? But that’s still, like, eighty years older than me. I was only twenty when I got out of college, you know. And you’re a friend of my father’s, so… well that had something to do with why I came onto you, that time. I suppose it was something psychological. Like wanting to get back at my father for treating me like a kid-which he still does to this day-and also like a subconscious desire to sleep with my father, too. Which is a subconscious desire on everybody’s part.”
“Not mine.”
“Well, with you it’d be your mother, I guess. You know what I mean. Don’t make fun.”
“What you’re trying to say is I’m like a father to you. When we’re screwing, that is.”
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