Wetbones

by John Shirley

Ephram wrote in his journal to soothe himself, after the irritation of his labours over Megan's body.

  He wrote, 'For 18 July 199 -':

  … found that the large wire clippers worked very well to remove her fingertips, and I disposed of the fingertips quite confidently off a pier, finger food for the crabs, ha ha. Disposed of the clippers off the pier also.

  The body presented another problem. The sea cannot be trusted with a cadaver. As planned, tied it to the underside of a train. This had to be carefully timed in order to avoid discovery of the body by railroad workers before the train should begin its work. All went well, thank the Spirit. The train dragged the body a goodly distance, face down on the cinders, making shreds of the face and many other identification details and of course providing a reasonable explanation for the death, if no coroner chooses to look too closely. After the ropes broke, it dropped the body. I removed the ropes. Some drugged girl wandering across a railroad yard… I of course used the blowtorch to remove body hair… Perhaps a full incinerator would be ideal after all and when I find another wealthy subject I will shore up my bank account and look into the purchase of an incinerator big enough to do the job… After disposing of Twenty-six I traced Twenty-seven by her pscent, ha ha, finding her outside one of those dreadful arcades at the Southshore Mall…

  Garner almost collapsed with relief when he saw Constance coming up the sidewalk. He didn't think about the odd, drifty way she was walking, didn't think about it consciously at first, till she came into the kitchen with him. Then he was hit by one incongruity after another.

  ''Where's your necklace?" She was never without that tacky gold-letter necklace that spelled out her name.

  "Hm?" She looked at him from the other side of a fog bank. "Um – I don't know." Indifferent. Normally she'd have run around like a decapitated chicken, looking for the necklace.

  She looked tired, too. She didn't smell like crack smoke or pot, but… all the other signs were there. She was wobbly on her feet. Not meeting his eyes. Distancing. Indifference to what used to be important to her.

  How could it happen so fast? It just didn't happen that way overnight.

  "What is it, hon?" he said gently. "Was it cocaine or what?"

  "What do you mean?" Her voice dreamily monotone. Normally she would have said, Da-ad! I'm sure! Gross!

  "Where's the car, Constance? I didn't see it outside."

  "Car?" She blinked. Twice. "Oh. God. I left it at the mall. I'm sorry." She smiled distantly. "Happiness comes in places you never expect, didn't you say that once, Dad?"

  "Uh – yeah."

  "You were right. I would never expect… a guy like…" She shut her mouth. Rather abruptly.

  "A guy like who, Constance? Hon – did someone give you drugs?"

  "No." Soft-spoken conviction. Convincing understatement.

  "You fall in love?" That was a kind of drugging. "Falling in love" released hormones, endorphins, made you feel drugged. He knew it was grasping at straws but he grasped at it anyway.

  "Sort of."

  "Sort of? Who with? Some guy you met at the mall?"

  "Yeah. His name's… Michael. And he's leaving town." And I can't stand to stay around this summer without him. So…" Suddenly she got all chirpy, sitting up straight and beaming at him as she asked it, as if to say, How could you say no, Dad? "Could I go visit his family in Los Angeles? They'll chaperone us."

  She was explaining, all this with uncharacteristic verbal clarity. Maybe it was just an infatuation drunkenness, after all.

  "This is pretty sudden," he said. "Can't I meet this guy before you take trips with his family? I mean, you only met him yourself today, sweetie."

  "Um – sometime. You can meet him sometime. I better go pick up the car, okay?"

  "I'll go with you," Garner said, watching for her reaction. She frowned, but didn't argue.

  They went. They took the last bus and picked up the car. It looked abandoned in the midst of the vast parking lot. In silence, they drove home. Garner cooked dinner; she ate her food mechanically but thoroughly. She continued to deny any drug use; quite convincingly, though with a weird detachment. Normally an accusation of that sort would have made her first outraged and then sulky.

  She went up to her room, to go to bed early.

  Garner finally dropped off to sleep about three a.m. He woke at six, knowing something was wrong.

  Knowing, with a cold-sweat certainty, that Constance had gone.

  2

  Los Angeles, a Day Earlier

  Prentice drove the rented Tercel down Sunset to Highland, made his way to Barham, bypassing the freeway where sunlight lanced off the thick metallic flow of traffic. He followed the curving road through the hills, past condos and ranch homes, and down into Burbank. His eyes burned as he drove into the valley. The palm trees looked gray as dead skin here.

  Arthwright had a development deal with Sunrise Studios and they gave him a little bungalow office on the old studio lot. Sunrise had bought the lot from MGM; somebody else had recently bought Sunrise, Prentice had forgotten who. A soft drink company or an oil company. Or possibly a soft drink company owned by an oil company which was maybe owned by a plastics conglomerate. The Security guard at the gate's little Checkpoint Charlie – a black guy in cop-style mirrored sunglasses – scanned a clipboard list to be sure Prentice really did have an appointment with Arthwright, then directed him to Parking Area F.

  "F for full," Prentice muttered, looking at the rows of Porsches and Jags. There was only one empty space, where the tarmac was stenciled LOU KENSON. The erstwhile star had lost his deal with Sunrise and was now on the actor's Out List. Kenson could be relied on not to show up to claim his parking place and Prentice was on the verge of being late. He took Kenson's place, but with a twinge: thinking maybe it was bad luck

  You could be as rational as a mathematician, but working the film industry you eventually came to believe in good and bad luck.

  Prentice got out of the car and looked around. The studio looked like a series of overlarge warehouses and overgrown barns with oversized doors. The sunwashed buildings were old, mostly dull green, their paint peeling. On the other side of the lot, just visible between the interior-shoot buildings, there were a few generic tenement-facades, false fronts used for shooting generic inner-city street scenes in generic cop movies.

  Prentice glanced at his watch, hurried out onto the little studio road. He found Building E and Zack Arthwright's office.

  Arthwright could have had a spacious suite in the big mirrorglass skyscraper that Sunrise had built adjacent to the old studio, but he affected the air of a Colden Era traditionalist – 'Arthwright Pictures' was printed on the door – and he stuck to the old-fashioned office bungalows with their wonky air conditioners and cracked green walls.

  This particular air conditioner was working too well, and noisily, thrumming rheumily to itself from a corner window behind a secretary who probably no longer heard it. The room was almost refrigerator cold, making Prentice think of the morgue. Amy in the file drawer. He'd worked hard at not thinking about that and he'd almost succeeded for half an hour.

  Arthwright's secretary was busty but otherwise scissor-thin; gold mascara around eyes glamoured by blue-tinted contact-lenses.

  She had a gold streak in her feathered blue black hair and a New Age crystal on a gold chain around her slender neck.

  "Hi, I'm Tom Prentice…"

  She glanced up from her work station with a brief but professionally sunny smile. "Go right on in, Tom, he's expecting you."

  Tom, she said, though she'd never met him before. Fake intimacy. Welcome back to Hollywood.

  Arthwright was, of course, using a speaker phone. He sat tilted back in a swivel chair with his faded black cowboy boots on his antique, leather inset desk, his brown leather suit jacket buttoned up in the excessive air conditioning. His long, curly brown hair was tied with rawhide strips into a small ponytail; his sharp-featured boyish face didn't tan very well, so his nose and cheeks
were always a little burned. Lines at the corners of his eyes, and the beginning of a double chin, told the truth: he was no more the enfant terrible journalists had made him out to be just a few years before. But he was hot with a string of hits, taking first and third place in the Summer Box Office, rentals going strong on the new release. Everyone wanted into see him, everyone had a pitch for him, and Buddy probably had to use up a favour to get Prentice the meeting.

  Prentice felt like he had been smuggled in, like a spy. The Spy Who Came In From The Out List, he thought.

  Arthwright winked, gestured at a chair. Prentice sat stiffly, trying not to be obvious about wiping his damp palms on his jeans.

  It was wrong to be here.

  "If your client doesn't want to deal, he doesn't want to deal," Arthwright was telling the phone, not missing a beat. "I'm not going to give him control. Whenever I give up creative control the damn thing just doesn't work. He can have an extra fifty out front. That's the best I can do."

  Prentice was embarrassed. Made to wait out a negotiation carried on in front of him as if he weren't there. But in fact part of it was probably Arthwright flashing power at Prentice. It didn't matter that Prentice was a relative nonentity. The demonstration would be something Arthwright did compulsively.

  Prentice tried to look interested in the office decorations. Framed movie posters on the walls, going back fifteen years to some of Arthwright's earliest: The Hellmakers, an old Lou Kenson western vehicle; The Grafters, the expose that had given Arthwright a veneer of respectability; Warm Knife, his mega hit thriller. The teaser read: Keep the knife under the pillow. It'll be warmer that way…

  Prentice stared at the poster for Warm Knife. Thinking: We're a sick bunch of flickers, all of us.

  "Creative control stays right here," Arthwright was telling the speaker phone. Turned sideways from Prentice, looking as if he were talking to the air; like Jimmy Stewart talking to Harvey. "If I need to, I can get Hagerstein. She's damn good."

  Arthwright took his long legs down and spun his swivel chair around once, in an absently playful way, as he waited for the ultimatum to sink in.

  "Zack, get real" A crackly female voice on the speaker phone. That'd be Doll Bechtman, Jeff Teitelbaum's agent. Prentice and Jeff had gone to NYU

  Film School together; had chased girls and made pretentious 16 millimeter student films together. Prentice decided he was going to have to look Jeff up.

  Evidently Arthwright was arguing with Doll Bechtman about Jeff. Prentice had met Doll once; a middle-aged woman with a look like Betty Crocker and a style like Roy Cohn. A barracuda, Jeff called her gleefully. The tougher she was, the better he liked it. It appeared she'd met her match in Arthwright. But she kept on: "I'm telling you, Jeff has good instincts. This Hagerstein woman cannot write an action picture. It'd be a joke."

  Jeff, Prentice mused. Arthwright was fucking Jeff Teitelbaum out of creative control on a movie? So what else was new.

  'Then tell Jeff to compromise a little, work with us, Doll. Look, I got someone here. You talk to Jeff."

  "I'll get back."

  "Sure, okay."

  Arthwright swivelled to the phone and hit the disconnect. He cocked his head impishly, grinned at Prentice, and said, "Tom. Long time no see."

  "Yeah. I've been holing up in New York." Prentice had only met Arthwright once, briefly. Arthwright probably didn't really remember the occasion.

  Prentice toyed with the idea of asking what Sunrise had cooking with Jeff. But, even though he was undoubtedly supposed to hear Arthwright throwing his weight around on the phone negotiation, he wasn't really supposed to listen to the details. He didn't need to ask, anyway, when he thought, about it. Arthwright was co-producing A Cop Named Dagger II for Sunrise; Jeff had conceived and written the first A Cop Named Dagger picture. Chances were, he was supposed to do the screenplay again but was holding out for creative control. Something few writers got till they became a "hyphenate" – writer-director, a writer-producer. Usually he had to be a Player, a guy who could command points of the gross profits. Jeff wasn't there yet.

  Why the hell did Jeff want to hold out for creative control over an action picture? But come to think of it, Jeff thought action pictures could be high art.

  Arthwright checked out his watch, and said, "Glad to see you back in town. What have you got for me?"

  Arthwright wanted the pitch now. It was do or die. "What I've got is…" Prentice spread his hands – and then stepped off the cliff into space. "… a comedy with a strong drama backbone, a twist on buddy pictures." He could see Arthwright's eyes glazing already. Another buddy picture. Prentice went on hurriedly, "A lady cop walks a beat in San Francisco. She walks it alone, in a tough neighbourhood. One day she gets a new partner – a rookie, a kid who ignores her eight years on the force and thinks he's hot shit, compared to her, because she's a woman and he can't take a woman seriously as a street cop. The humour'll come naturally. She's going to learn he's not the asshole he seems, deep down; he's going to learn she's a good cop and that he's got a lot to learn."

  It sounded stupid to Prentice in his own ears, just now. It sounded vague and fatuous.

  "Uh huh." Arthwright managed to seem half interested. "Might be a little predictable. Familiar."

  Come on, you son of a bitch, Prentice thought. All your fucking movies are predictable. Out loud he said, "It's a question of how it'll be carried off. They're on foot, they're part of the neighbourhood, and walking a beat is different to being in a cruiser, gives them a feeling of family with the people' they protect. And there'll be some plot twists. I've got an outline right now, hasn't got all the plot points but it's basically there. I see it as having the appeal of Alien Nation – only it's funnier, and it's men and women. Men and women are alien to one another when they're thrust into this kind of situation. We play it for laughs." Alien Nation? A pretty dumb comparison. Get your shit together, Prentice!

  Prentice waited. He'd shot his wad, he decided.

  After a moment of staring glaze-eyed at a Grammy on a shelf of otherwise mostly minor awards – he'd started out in record production – Arthwright nodded sharply, but contradicted the nod by saying, " Broken Windows didn't work out too well. That was a cop thing too. Might be hard for me to sell you after that."

  Meaning sell him to the Studio. Convince them to do it. Which was bullshit. Arthwright could do what he wanted, now, if he really wanted to do it.

  What had he said? A cop thing too. Like A Cop Named Dagger, like Broken Windows. Cop Things, everything seemed to be Cop Things.

  " Broken Windows was a straight ahead drama," Prentice pointed out, hoping he didn't sound desperate. "Not my forte. I shouldn't have tried it. I can't pull it off without comedy in there too. That's where I shine. I had two hits." And a flop, and one so-so. "And you might point out to the studio that Broken Windows wasn't really a cop thing. It was about burglars, it was mostly from their side, so it was a problem of antiheroes. This wouldn't have that problem."

  His back was sticking to his shirt with sweat. When you had to apologize and explain, backing and filling, it wasn't going to fly. Shit.

  Arthwright said, "Okay, well, have Buddy messenger the outline over to me and I'll take a look. Has this baby got a name or are you just calling it Junior?"

  Prentice laughed nervously. "I'm calling it Tenderloin Seven right now. It's set in San Francisco."

  'You're from San Francisco originally, aren't you?" Arthwright asked abstractedly, standing. Standing up was a way of telling him he was expected to leave without actually having to say it.

  They shook hands. Prentice said, "I grew up in San Francisco. How'd you know I was from there?"

  "The 49ers shirt might have done it," Arthwright said, letting his hand drop, grinning.

  "Oh yeah. I forgot to change back to the Clark Kent suit."

  Arthwright faked a chuckle. He was checking his calendar, as he added, half to himself, "And Amy mentioned it."

  Prentice stared. "Amy? My wife Amy
?"

  "Uh huh. I -" Arthwright looked up at Prentice blankly. Hesitation. Just a fraction of a second. Arthwright hadn't meant to bring this up, apparently. "She was out at a party in Malibu. Judy Denver's place. I talked to Amy a little. She had a high opinion of you. She was a sweet girl."

  So Buddy had told Arthwright that Amy had died. Unless he'd heard it somewhere else.

  Had he got the appointment out of charity, because of Amy's death? Christ. I'm climbing on Amy's body.

  And Amy had met Arthwright. And Arthwright was working with Jeff. The world wasn't just small, it was cramped.

  ''Yeah. Yeah, she was… a sweet girl," Prentice managed.

  "Yes. Well. I've got a late lunch…"

  "Right. I'll ask Buddy to get that outline to you. Take it easy."

  "Whenever I can. Talk to you later, Tom."

  Prentice hurried out, as Arthwright left instructions with his secretary.

  Outside, the day seemed brutally warm after the over zealous air conditioning. But he strolled round a little, thinking. Suppose the deal with Arthwright didn't come off? What then? Arthwright had been discussing Jeff Teitelbaum. By God, Jeff might just be able to help him.

  Prentice paused to frown up at one of the tenement facades. All the sets looked familiar – but this one seemed to jump out at him for recognition. Maybe it had been used for A Cop Named Dagger. Jeff had sent Prentice a polaroid, a shot of Jeff posing on the set of Dagger, peeking around the edge of one of the false fronts; the fake bricks on the front were spraypainted with equally fake graffiti. But the polaroid's angle revealed the raw-wood supports holding up the false fronts from behind, and in the picture Jeff was crouched in the shadows, peering around from the real world into the make-believe world, leering at the female lead, Zena Holdbridge.

  A couple of months earlier Jeff had sent Prentice a postcard from Maui. Jeff was the kind of guy who sent you post cards from Hawaii of topless girls stretching out in the sand, under a printed caption that read, Great View From My Hotel! Jeff getting off on the baldfaced kitsch of it all.