“I swam out. My ride’s back at the town beach.”
Tito’s hair was indeed wet, Mitch now noticed, as were the yellow nylon shorts that he was wearing. The orange-and-blue T-shirt he was wearing was dry. It was one of Mitch’s T-shirts. In fact, it was Mitch’s treasured and exceedingly threadbare New York Mets 1986 World Series T-shirt. He’d owned that shirt since he was in high school. And Tito had gone and helped himself right to it.
“That wasn’t very smart of you,” Mitch told him. “People have drowned trying to swim out here-the river currents can be treacherous. That’s how the island got its name. Back before they built the causeway they used a little ferry boat, and it capsized and a Peck daughter washed out to sea.” Mitch stared at the young actor, wondering what it would be like to be so handsome. Everyone in the world wanted to look like Tito Molina-and yet his unparalleled good looks hadn’t brought him anything even remotely close to happiness. “It would have been better if you’d buzzed me. I’d have raised the gate for you.”
“How could you do that, man? You weren’t here.”
“I was at the beach club. I thought you’d be there, too. I thought we’d have a chance to talk then.”
Tito didn’t respond. Just poured himself some more of Mitch’s scotch, his hand wavering unsteadily.
Mitch abruptly rose and marched into the kitchen for his emergency stash-the family-sized squeeze bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup that he kept hidden under the sink behind the laundry detergent and furniture polish, away from Des’s disapproving eyes.
“What are you doing in there?” Tito called to him.
Mitch returned with the syrup and sat. “Just getting comfortable,” he replied, squirting a generous shot of it onto his tongue.
“You have really disgusting personal habits, man,” Tito observed, curling his lip.
“Hey, you pick your remedy, I’ll pick mine.”
“Fair enough,” the actor conceded. “I hear you’re hooked up with the trooper lady.”
“So what?”
“So nothing. I’m envious, that’s all.”
“You’re married to the sexiest woman in America and you envy me?”
“Totally. Yours is the real deal. The way that she took charge of our situation today. Charged right in, no fear…” Tito gazed out the window, his knee jiggling nervously. “That was so cool.”
“Esme said you’d be at the beach club tonight.”
“She shouldn’t have. I told her I wouldn’t go.” He drank some more scotch, his finely sculpted features tightening. “She’s my Miss America, know what I’m saying? All she needs is the damned crown and that… what’s that thing they wear across their boobies, says where they come from?”
“A sash?”
Tito nodded. “Right. But she doesn’t listen to me when I tell her things. I’d never go near a place like that. It’s filled with dead men walking. I start hanging at their damned beach club with them then I’m not me anymore, know what I’m saying?”
“Yes, I think I do.”
“Okay, what did you mean by that?” Tito demanded suddenly.
Mitch shook his head at him, perplexed. The man was an absolute master at keeping people off-balance. “By what?”
“This afternoon, you said I was better than this. What did you mean?”
“It doesn’t exactly require a translation.”
Tito gazed at him searchingly. “I’m just a poor dumb beaner, jack. I need one, okay?”
Tito Molina sure needed something. He seemed to be consumed by inner disquiet. Mitch just didn’t know what it was he needed, or why he seemed to feel he needed it from him.
Mitch settled back on the loveseat with his syrup bottle, listening to the foghorn. “I was there on opening night when you were in Salesman. I saw it happen, Tito. I saw you blow Malkovich right off of that stage. You’re the real deal. You have the talent and looks and pure unadulterated star quality to do whatever you want. They can’t stop you. And that’s rare. One, maybe two actors in a generation have what you’ve got. Newman had it. Redford had it. Right now, there’s you and there’s only you. For me, it’s as if you’re holding a fortune right in the palm of your hand and instead of investing it wisely you’re pissing it away on crap like Dark Star, and I wish like hell you wouldn’t.”
Tito threw down another hit of scotch, shuddering. “Sometimes it’s like a trade-off. You’ve got to do that stuff so they’ll let you do what you really want.”
“I understand that,” Mitch said. “But what is it that you really want to do?”
“Man, I don’t know,” he replied, staring gloomily down into his glass.
“I don’t believe that. You know exactly what you want to do.”
Tito peered up at him suspiciously. “Okay, so maybe I do. What I want… I want to make a movie about my father. It would be, like, a way to understand where I come from, know what I’m saying? See, he was just this really angry, screwed-up juicehead and he died-”
“In a bar fight, I know.”
“I’d play him myself, see. And Esme would play my crazy mother. I’ve written the script. Most of it, anyway. And I want to direct it myself, too, which means I’d have to raise the money myself, which my agent totally hates. But that’s okay, because I don’t think I’ll be straight with myself until I do this. I need to do this.” He glanced at Mitch uncertainly. “You’re a smart guy. You know about things. Word up, what do you think?”
Mitch stared back at him for a moment. Now he knew why Tito Molina was here, what he wanted. Tito was an actor. He wanted Mitch to direct him. “I think you should do it.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely, because you’re passionate about it. You should always work on whatever you’re most passionate about. Otherwise you’re just another meat sack, wasting your time, wasting your life…” Mitch applied more syrup to his tongue. “Unless you can’t afford to do it, that is.”
“Hell yes, I can afford it. They gave me twenty mil for Dark Star. That’s my going rate now. I’m in the club, man. But, see, my agent wants me and Esme to do this romantic comedy together, Puppy Love.”
“I’ll probably be sorry I asked you this, but what’s it about?”
“I play a young veterinarian from the wrong side of the tracks,” Tito replied woodenly. “She’s a high-class breeder of champion basset hounds. We meet. We fall in love. We fall out of love. We-”
“Say no more. Please.” It sounded like a feel-good sapfest, the kind where exhibitors ought to post a sign at the box office reading Diabetics Enter at Own Risk. “Do you like the script?”
“No, I hate it. It’s just this bunch of cute, fake moments, strung together like beads. Totally Hollywood, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, I know exactly what you mean.”
“But it’s a go project. The studio’s behind it.”
“And Esme?”
“She’ll do it if I will. But I don’t know, man. I feel like…” Tito ran a hand over his face, distraught. “I feel like I don’t have any real say in what happens. Like I’m not an actual person, just a character in a movie that somebody else is creating. None of it’s real. I’m not real. Esme’s not real. Esme and me, Chrissie and me.. .”
“What about Chrissie and you?” Mitch asked, frowning.
“Nothing, man. Forget that. Would you read the pages I’ve written?” he asked Mitch nervously.
“I’d be honored,” replied Mitch, who found himself discovering the same thing about Tito that Dodge had. Mitch liked the guy. He didn’t expect to, but he did. There was genuine boyish innocence to him that came through in spite of that twitchy anger. “Mind you, this means I won’t be able to review it when it comes out. Hey, wait, is this all just an insidious ploy to disqualify me?”
“No way,” Tito insisted. “I’m not that clever, man. I swear it.”
“In that case, I’ll be happy to read your pages. Drop them by any time.”
Tito sat there staring out the wind
ow for a long moment. “I don’t know, it’s all just so…” He trailed off. Briefly, he seemed very far away. Then he shook himself and drained his scotch. “I’m in the middle of something bad. Something I got myself into. And I can’t get out of it.”
Mitch watched the actor curiously. Was he still talking about Puppy Love or had he moved on to something else? Mitch couldn’t tell. “You can get out of anything if you really want to. You’re in charge of your own life, Tito. You have the power.”
“What power, man? I don’t even know who I am.”
“Do you want to know?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“Trust me, that puts you way ahead of most people.”
Now Tito jumped to his feet, so suddenly that Mitch found himself flinching. It was an involuntary thing, and if the actor noticed it he didn’t let on. “Gotta go. Big thanks, man.”
“For what, Tito?”
“The T-shirt,” he replied, flashing a smile at him.
“I wouldn’t mind getting that back, if you think of it.”
“You can have it right now,” Tito said easily. “I’m all dried off.”
“No, go ahead and wear it home. It’s damp out. You might catch cold. Besides, it looks so much better on you.”
Tito went to the door and opened it, pausing there in the doorway. “Sorry about this afternoon.”
“It’s forgotten, as far I’m concerned. Can I give you a lift back to your car?”
“Naw, I’m cool. I’ll take that bridge thing back. The walk will do me good. Later, man.”
Mitch flicked on the porch light and watched Tito Molina melt soundlessly into the fog just like Sinatra did after he delivered the Arabian pony to the young lord in The List of Adrian Messenger, one of Mitch’s favorite thrillers in spite of George C. Scott’s awful English accent. Quirt was curled up on a tarp under the bay window, his eyes shining at Mitch. Mitch said good night to him, then flicked off the light and went back inside, breathing deeply in and out.
He hadn’t realized it, but he had been holding his breath practically the entire time since he’d walked in on Tito.
He crawled right into bed, Clemmie snuggling up against his chest for the first time in weeks. Mitch didn’t know if this was her trying to atone for being disloyal to him or whether she just felt cold. And he didn’t much care. He was just grateful to have her there. Exhausted, he lay there stroking her tummy and listening to her purr. And now the rain started to patter softly against the skylights over his bed. Mitch lay there with Clemmie, listening to it come down and growing sleepier by the second. Soon, they had both drifted off.
His bedside phone jarred him awake. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep. It didn’t seem like very long. He fumbled for it, jostling Clemmie, who sprang from the bed and scampered downstairs. “H-Hello… Whassa?…”
“I’m sorry if I woke you. I just wanted you to know something.”
“Okay… Uh, sure.” Mitch sat up, recognizing the voice on the other end despite the steady, persistent roar in the background. “Where are you?”
“I’m on Sugar Mountain, with the barkers and the colored balloons.”
“Wait, give me a second, I know what that’s… Neil Young, right?”
“You are.”
“What’s that whooshing noise? Are you hanging out in a men’s room somewhere?”
“Not exactly.”
“What time is it anyway?”
“It’s too late. The damage is done. The hangman says it’s time to let her fly.”
“What hangman? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Good-bye, Mitch.”
“Wait, don’t-!”
No use. The line had already gone dead.
Mitch lay there trying to figure out what on earth had just happened. Briefly, he wondered if he’d simply dreamed the whole conversation. He decided there was no sense to be made of it now. He was just too damned tired. So he rolled over and fell immediately back to sleep.
Until another phone call awakened him. This time it was Des. It was dawn now and a steady, driving rain was pounding the skylight over Mitch’s head.
“Baby, I’m sorry to wake you-”
“No, no. I’m glad you called,” he assured her, yawning. “I didn’t feel good about how we left things yesterday. I shouldn’t have hung up on you.”
“Mitch…”
“I was just having a bad day. I understand that you have to obsess. If you don’t, you won’t get anywhere.”
“Mitch…”
“So was that our first real fight? Because if it was I don’t think it was that bad, do you?”
“Baby, please listen to me…”
Something in her voice stopped him now. “Why, what is it?”
“I’m on my way up to the Devil’s Hopyard. The ranger’s found a body at the base of the falls. A jumper, apparently.”
The hangman says it’s time to let her fly.
Mitch’s heart began to pound. “God, I should have known. The falls, damn it. That’s what I was hearing…”
“When?” she demanded. “What do you know about this?”
“It’s him, isn’t it?” he said, his voice filling with dread. “It’s Tito.”
She didn’t need to answer him. Her silence said it all.
Mitch closed his eyes and let out a groan of sheer agony.
His own worst nightmare had just taken a giant leap into pure horror.
CHAPTER 6
The road up to the Devil’s Hopyard State Park was intensely twisty and narrow. Des’s cruiser very nearly scraped the mountain laurel and hemlocks that grew on either side of it as she steered her way toward the falls, the wet pavement steaming in front of her as the sunlight broke through the early morning haze. Already, she had her air conditioning cranked up high. The Hopyard was situated in Dorset’s remote northeast corner. Very few people lived up here. She spotted a farmhouse every once in a while. Mostly she saw only granite ledge and trees, trees, trees.
The road dead-ended at the entrance to the falls, where a uniformed park ranger was waiting for Des next to a green pickup. Due to funding cuts, many of the state parks made do with summer interns, most of them college students. Kathleen Moloney, the trimly built blond who met Des, was exceedingly young and fresh faced.
Des nosed up alongside of the pickup and got out, her hornrimmed glasses immediately fogging up in the warm, humid air. Des had to wipe them dry with the clean white handkerchief that she kept in her back pocket.
One other vehicle, a scraped-up black Jeep Wrangler, was parked there in the ditch next to the gate.
“It’s just awful,” Kathleen said to her over the steady roar of the falls, her voice cracking. “I’ve never seen anything like this. I was making my routine morning swing through the park, you know? I didn’t even know what I was looking at when I first saw him. I swear, I just thought it was a bundle of old clothes.”
“I’m sorry you had to see it,” Des said to her sympathetically. Finding a jumper was definitely pukeworthy.
Des paused to take a closer look at the Jeep. The scrapes werefresh-loose flecks of black paint came right off on her fingers. A mud-splattered cell phone lay on the wet ground a few feet away on the driver’s side. Before she did anything else Des bagged it and stashed it in her trunk. Then she opened the Jeep’s passenger door and poked around inside. She spotted no suicide note. She did find a car rental agreement stuffed in the glove compartment, made out to Tito Molina. She returned it to the glove compartment and closed the Jeep back up.
“Let’s go have us a look, Kathleen, okay? And if you start to feel the least bit funky, just sing out. We don’t have any heroes in this unit.”
The young ranger smiled at her gratefully and ushered her inside the gate on foot, where there was a parking lot adjoined by picnic grounds. At this spot, they were up above the waterfall. “It’s happened before,” she told Des as they walked. “A pair of lovers jumped off together back in the ’80s. And there w
as a teenaged boy high on drugs a couple of years ago. I was warned. But I still… I wasn’t ready for this.”
“Trust me, no one is,” Des said as they arrived at a guardrail that was posted with a sign: Let the Water Do the Falling. Stay Behind This Point.
“I think I know where he jumped from. We can take a look before we go down, if you’d like. Just watch your step.”
Des followed her over the guardrail and out onto a bare outcropping of rock, stepping carefully. The granite surface was slick and mossy, and the soles of her brogans were not ideal for rock climbing. An empty pint bottle of peppermint schnapps lay there. She eye-balled it to see if he’d left a suicide note rolled up inside of it. He hadn’t. Beyond that, she kept her distance, not wanting to compromise the scene. From where she stood she saw a few spent matches. No muddy shoeprints on the granite. Not that she expected any. The night’s rain would have washed them away.
“You can see him from here.” said Kathleen, crouching near the edge of the outcropping.
Des inched over beside her and peered over the side of the sheergranite face. Mostly, what she saw was the swirling white foam of the river as it came crashing down onto the smooth, shiny gray a hundred feet below. But then her eyes did make out a small patch of color-a figure in an orange T-shirt and blue jeans that lay there down on those rocks.
“Okay, Kathleen, I’ve seen enough.”
They retraced their footsteps back to the guardrail and made their way down a narrow footpath to the base of the falls. It was a steep and demanding descent. The path was not only mucky from the rain but was crisscrossed with exposed tree roots. Des wished she had on hiking boots like the ranger did.
Tito Molina had landed faceup on the boulders that were next to river, his eyes wide open. His arms and legs seemed grotesquely shrunken inside of the T-shirt and jeans he had on. He looked like a small boy dressed in a man’s clothing. His famous, chiseled face had crumpled in upon itself, like a high-rise building after the demolition man has imploded it. Blood and brain matter had oozed out onto the rocks from under his shattered head. The back of his skull seemed to have borne the brunt of the impact, which Des found a bit surprising. So did the direction he was facing-his feet were pointing toward the outcropping that he’d leapt from. She stood there looking at him for a long moment, feeling that old, familiar uptick of her pulse. She hadn’t felt it for a while. Not handing out traffic tickets to obnoxious tourists.
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