“Did he say anything about how much you’re going to make?” Will asked.
“No! I wasn’t going to ruin the moment with a crass discussion about money.”
“Well, you’re not going to retire on what they’re paying up front. Is she, Greg, unless there’s a lot of dough in investigative journalism?”
The young man wouldn’t take the bait.
“It’s a small publisher, Dad! They only do like ten books a year.”
“Are you doing a book tour?” Nancy asked.
“I don’t know yet but it’s not like it’s going to be some huge book. It’s literary fiction, not a pulp novel.”
Nancy wanted to know when she could read it.
“The galleys should be out in a few months. I’ll send you a copy. Want to read it, Dad?”
He stared at her. “I don’t know, do I?”
“I think you’ll survive.”
“Not every day you get called a wrecking ball—especially by your daughter,” he said ruefully.
“It’s a novel. It’s not you. It’s inspired by you.”
Will raised his glass. “Here’s to inspirational men.”
They clinked glasses again.
“Did you read it, Greg?” Will asked.
“I did. It’s superb.”
“So you know more about me than I know about you.” Will was getting looser and louder. “Maybe her next book’ll be about you.”
The comment made Laura say acidly, “You know, you really ought to read it. I’ve turned it into a screenplay—how’s that for hopeful? I’ll leave a copy. It’s a quicker read. You’ll get the idea.”
Laura and Greg left soon after dinner to catch a train back to Washington. Nancy stayed behind to help clean up. The evening was too pleasant to cut short, and Will had shaken off his irritability and seemed relaxed and mellow, an altogether different man from the coiled spring she encountered every day on the job.
Outside, the light was bleaching out and the traffic noises were fading, except for the occasional wail of a Bellevue ambulance. They worked side by side in the little kitchenette, washing and drying, both swaying with the afterglow of the champagne. Will was already on the scotch. Both of them were happily out of their routine, and the domestic simplicity of doing dishes was soothing.
It wasn’t planned—Will would reflect on it later—but instead of reaching for the next plate, he reached for her ass and started rubbing it gently in little circles. In retrospect, he should have seen it coming.
She had cheekbones now and an hour-glass shape and, damn it, he would say if asked, looks mattered to him. But even more, her personality had molded under his tutelage. She was calmer, less gung-ho and caffeinated, and to his amusement, some of his cynicism had rubbed off. There was the occasional pleasant whiff of sarcasm emanating from her mouth. The insufferable Girl Scout was gone and in her place was a woman who no longer jangled his nerve endings. Quite the opposite.
Her hands were in soapy water. She kept them there, closed her eyes for a moment and didn’t say or do anything.
He turned her toward him and she had to figure out what to do with her hands. She finally placed them wet on his shoulders and said, “Do you think this is a good idea?”
“No, do you?”
“Nope.”
He kissed her and liked the way her lips felt and the way her jaw softened. He cupped her bottom with both palms and felt the smooth denim. His boozy head got hazy with desire and he pressed against her.
“The housekeeper came today. I’ve got clean sheets,” he whispered.
“You know how to romance a girl.” She wanted this to happen, he could tell.
He led her by a slippery hand to the bedroom, flopped on the bedspread and pulled her on top.
He was kissing her blood-warm neck, feeling under her blouse, when she said, “We’re going to regret this. It’s against all—”
He covered her lips with his mouth then pulled back to say, “Look, if you really don’t want to, we can roll the clock back a few minutes and finish the dishes.”
She kissed him, the first one that was hers to give. She said, “I hate doing dishes.”
When they left the bedroom, it was dark and the living room was eerily quiet, just the hum of the air conditioner and the low whoosh of distant traffic on the FDR Drive. He had given her a clean white dress shirt to put on, something he’d done before with new women. They seemed to like the feeling of starch against bare skin and all the iconic imagery of the ritual. She was no different. The shirt swallowed her up and covered her prudishly. She sat on the sofa and drew her knees up to her chest. The skin that showed was cool and mottled like alabaster.
“Want a drink?” he asked.
“I think I’ve had quite enough tonight.”
“You sorry?”
“Should be, but I’m not.” Her face was still tinged pink. He thought she looked prettier than he had ever seen her, but also older, more womanly. “I kind of thought this might happen,” she said.
“For how long?”
“The beginning.”
“Really! Why?”
“A combination of your reputation and mine.”
“I didn’t know you had one too.”
“It’s a different sort of reputation.” She sighed. “Good girl, safe choices, never rocking the boat. I think I’ve secretly wanted the boat to capsize, to see what it felt like.”
He smiled. “From wrecking ball to shipwreck. Spot the common theme?”
“You’re a bad boy, Will Piper. Good girls secretly like bad boys, didn’t you know?”
His head was clearer, almost flat sober. “We’re going to have to hide this, you know.”
“I know.”
“I mean, your career and my retirement.”
“I know, Will! I should go.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Thank you but I don’t think you really want a sleepover.” Before he could respond, she touched the cover of Laura’s script on the coffee table. “You going to read it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Then, “Probably.”
“I think she wants you to.”
When he was alone, he poured a scotch, sat on the sofa and turned on the table lamp. The brightness of the bulb stung his eyes. He stared at his daughter’s screenplay, the image of the lightbulb scorching the cover. As the image receded it looked for all the world like a sinister smiley face staring back at him. It dared him to pick up the script. He took the dare and muttered, “Fucking wrecking ball.”
He’d never read a screenplay before. Its shiny brass brads reminded him of the last time he’d laid eyes on one, a month earlier at Mark Shackleton’s house. He turned the cover page and waded in—the format confused him with all the interior/exterior jazz.
After a few pages he had to start over, but then he got into the swing of it. Apparently, the character he inspired was named Jack, a man whose sparse description seemed to fit him to a tee: a brawny man in his forties, a sandy-haired product of the South with an easy manner and a hard edge.
Unsurprisingly, Jack was a high-functioning alcoholic and womanizer. He was in a new relationship with Marie, a sculptress who knew better than to let a man like him into her life but was powerless to resist him. Jack, it seemed, had left a trail of women in his wake, and—painfully to Will—one of them was a daughter, a young woman named Vicki. Jack was haunted by flashbacks of Amelia, an emotionally frail woman whom he had beaten to a metaphysical pulp before she set herself free with vodka and carbon monoxide. Amelia—a thinly veiled homage to Melanie, Will’s first wife and Laura’s mother—was a woman who found the waters of life too difficult and complicated to navigate. Throughout the script, she appeared to him, cherry red from the poison, rebuking him about his cruelty to Marie.
Midway through the script, Will found himself too sober to continue, so he poured a fresh three fingers. He waited for the drink to anesthetize him then carried on till the bitter end, to Marie’s s
uicide, witnessed by the sobbing presence of Amelia, and to Vicki’s redemptive decision to leave her own abusive relationship and choose a kinder, though less passionate man. And Jack? He moved on to Sarah, Marie’s cousin, who he met at her funeral, the wrecking ball still swinging away.
When he put the script down, he wondered why he wasn’t crying.
So this was how his daughter saw him. Was he that grotesque?
He thought about his ex-wives, multiple girlfriends, the conga line of one-nighters, and now Nancy. Most of them pretty nice gals. He thought about his daughter, a good egg tainted by the sulfurous bad-egg smell of her father. He thought about—
Suddenly, his introspection braked to a screeching halt. He grabbed at the script and opened it to a random page.
“Son of a bitch!”
The screenplay font.
It was Courier 12 point, the same as the Doomsday postcards.
He had forgotten his initial puzzlement at the postcard font, an old standby from the days of typewriters but a more uncommon choice in the computer/printer age. Times New Roman, Garamond, Arial, Helvetica—these were the new standards in the world of pull-down menus.
He jumped onto the Internet and had his answer. Courier 12 was the mandatory font for screenplays, completely de rigueur. If you submitted a script to a producer in another format you’d be laughed out of town. Another tidbit: it was also widely used by computer programmers to write source code.
A mental vision slammed into his thoughts. A couple of screenplays authored by “Peter Benedict” and a few black Pentel pens sat on a white desk near a bookcase filled with computer programming books. Mark Shackleton’s voice-over completed the imagery: “I don’t think you’re going to catch the guy.”
He spent a short while contemplating the associations, odd as they were, before dismissing as absurd the notion there might be a connection between the Doomsday case and his college roommate. Schackleton, the grown-up nerd, running around New York, stabbing, shooting, sowing mayhem! Please!
Still, the postcard font was an unplumbed clue—he strongly felt it now—and he knew that to ignore one of his hunches would be foolhardy, especially when otherwise they were at a complete dead end.
He grabbed his cell phone and excitedly texted Nancy: U and I are going to be reading scripts. Doomie may be a screenwriter.
JULY 28, 2009
LAS VEGAS
She felt the smooth, cool fourteen-carat links of the wrist-band and ran her fingertip over the rough border of diamonds around the narrow rectangular watch face.
“I like this one,” she murmured.
“Excellent choice, madame,” the jeweler said. “This Harry Winston is a popular choice. It’s called the ‘Avenue Lady.’”
The name made her laugh. “Hear what it’s called?” she asked her companion.
“Yep.”
“Isn’t that perfect!”
“How much?” he asked.
The jeweler looked him in the eye. If the man had been Japanese or Korean or an Arab, he’d have known the sale was in the bag. As it was, Americans in khakis and baseball caps were a tough call. “I can sell it to sir today for $24,000.”
Her eyes widened. This was the most expensive one. Still, she loved it, and let him know by nervously touching the bare skin of his forearm.
“We’ll take it,” he said without hesitation.
“Very good, sir. How would sir like to pay?”
“Just put it on my room. We’re staying in the Piazza Suite.”
The jeweler would have to pop into the back room to confirm the sale but he was feeling solid. The suite was one of their best, fourteen-hundred square feet of marble and opulence, with a spa and sunken living room.
She was wearing the watch when they left the shop. The sky over St. Mark’s Square was perfectly baby blue with just the right assortment of fluffy cumulus clouds. A gondola ferrying a rigid, unsmiling Swiss couple glided by. The gondolier launched into song to stir up some emotion in his charges, and his rich voice echoed off the dome. Everything was perfect, her companion thought. The non-Mediterranean temperature, the absence of brackish smells from real canals, and no pigeons. He hated the dirty birds ever since his parents had taken him to the authentic St. Mark’s Square as a shy and sensitive boy and a tourist lobbed a handful of bread crumbs near his feet. The pigeon swarm nightmarishly overwhelmed him, and even as an adult he recoiled when he saw flapping wings.
She was wearing the watch as they strolled arm in arm through the lobby of the Venetian Hotel.
She was wearing the watch in the elevator, cocking her hand at an angle to catch the attention of the three ladies riding with them.
And she was wearing the watch and nothing else up in the suite when she gave him the best sex he’d ever had.
He let her call him Mark now, and instead of Lydia, she let him use her real name, Kerry. Kerry Hightower.
She was from Nitro, West Virginia, a river town founded at the turn of the century around a gunpowder plant. It was a gritty place notable for little except that Clark Gable once worked there as a telephone repairman. Growing up poor, she watched old Clark Gable movies and dreamed of becoming a Hollywood actress.
In junior high she discovered her acting skills were not abundant but she doggedly tried out for every school play and community production, landing small supporting roles only because she was so earnest and attractive. But in high school she discovered a higher talent. She loved sex, was extremely good at it, and was completely and charmingly uninhibited. In a revelation, she settled on a new amalgamated calling: she decided she would become a porn star.
A fellow cheerleader, two years older, had moved to Las Vegas and was working as a card dealer. To Kerry, Vegas was nine-tenths on the way to California, where, as she understood it, the adult film business flourished. A week after graduation from Nitro High, she bought a one-way ticket to Nevada and moved in with her old chum. Life there wasn’t easy, but her sunny disposition kept her afloat. She bopped around from one low-paying job to another until she landed, if not on her feet, on her back at an escort agency.
When she’d met Mark at the Constellation, she was on her fourth agency in three years, finally accumulating a little money. She only worked for higher-end outfits where her non-pierced, nontattooed, girl-next-door persona was valued. Most of the men she dated were nice enough fellows—she could count the number of times on one hand when she felt abused or threatened. She never fell for any of her customers—they were johns, after all—but Mark was different.
From the start she found him nerdy and sweet with no macho pretenses. He was wicked smart too, and his job at Area 51 drove her crazy with curiosity because, when she was ten, she was certain she’d seen a flying saucer one summer night, darting high over the Kanawha River, as bright as a jar of lightning bugs collected on the riverbank.
And in the past few weeks, he had dropped the pseudonym and started buying up all of her time and lavishing presents on her. She was starting to feel more like a girlfriend and less like a call girl. He was getting more self-assured by the day, and while he was never going to be Clark Gable, he was beginning to grow on her.
She was unaware that with $5 million sitting high and dry in an offshore bank account, he was feeling more confident about the accomplishments of Mark Shackleton. Peter Benedict was gone. He wasn’t needed anymore.
Even the bathrooms in the suite had flat-screen TVs. Mark got out of the shower and started toweling himself. There was a cable channel on. He wasn’t paying attention until he heard the word Doomsday and looked up to see Will Piper on a replay of the weekly FBI press conference, standing tall at a podium speaking into a crop of microphones. The sight of Will on TV always made his heart race. He reached for his toothbrush without taking his eyes off the screen and began brushing his teeth.
The last time he’d seen Will at a media briefing, he looked lackluster and dispirited. The postcards and killings had stopped and the wall-to-wall coverage was no longer su
stainable. The long unsolved case had drained the public and law enforcement alike. But he seemed more energized today. The old intensity was back. Mark pushed the volume button.
“I can say this,” Will was saying. “We are pursuing some new leads and I remain completely confident we will catch the killer.”
That irritated Mark and he said, “Oh, bullshit! Give it up, man,” before turning off the TV.
Kerry was snoozing on the bed, naked underneath a thin sheet. Mark cinched his bathrobe and retrieved his laptop from his briefcase in the suite’s sunken living room. He went online and saw he had an e-mail from Nelson Elder. Elder’s list was longer than usual—business was good. It took Mark the better part of half an hour to complete the job and reply via his secure portal.
He went back to the bedroom. Kerry was stirring. She waved her adorned wrist in the air and said something about how great it would be to have a matching necklace. She threw off the sheet and sweetly beckoned him with a finger.
At that precise moment, Will and Nancy were having the opposite of sex. They were sitting at Will’s office plowing through a mind-numbing mountain of bad screenplays, completely unsure of the object of their exercise.
“Why were you so confident at the news conference?” she asked him.
“Did I overdo it?” he asked sleepily.
“Oh, yeah. Big-time. I mean, what do we have here?”
Will had to shrug. “A wild-goose chase is better than doing nothing.”
“You should’ve told the press that. What are you going to say next week?”
“Next week’s a week away.”
The wild-goose chase almost didn’t happen. Will’s initial call to the Writers Guild of America was a disaster. They lit into him about the Patriot Act and vowed to fight till Hell froze over to prevent the government from getting its mitts on a single script in its archives. “We’re not looking for terrorists,” he had protested, “just a demented serial killer.” But the WGA was not going to give in without a fight, so he got his superiors to sign off on a subpoena.
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