by Lanyon, Josh
The morning dragged. The afternoon wasn’t much better. I was freaking myself out thinking about dinner that evening, wondering what I could say or do to convince Lenny Norman that I was the right guy for the job.
About two o’clock I worked out in the weight room, showered and came downstairs for a snack. As I reached the ground floor I could hear Steve’s excited and tinny voice echoing through the dining room.
“Sean. Fuck. Sean, pick up. Fuck, pick up!”
Through the glass door I could see Markowitz and Maria out on the deck in deep discussion. About what? I stretched across the counter for the phone.
“What’s up?”
“Sean! Someone shot Lenny Norman!”
I said stupidly, “When?”
“I don’t know. His gardener found him this morning.”
“Is he—?”
“Yes, he’s dead! He was shot to death. Somebody blew a couple of holes through his chest.”
Behind me I heard a key in the front door. Too early for Dan. I turned, automatically dropping the handset into the cradle, cutting Steve’s shocked voice off.
I stared across the wasteland of counter and table tops, the stretch of carpet and wooden floor. The sunlight lancing through the blinds was so bright it hurt my eyes. Hurt my head…
The front door opened and Dan stepped in, his face hard and unfamiliar behind dark sunglasses. He looked like a movie hit man, well-dressed and ruthless.
I said, “Lenny Norman’s dead. Hammond shot him.”
My voice was quiet and tired in the big empty rooms. Not strong enough to carry through the rush of noisy sunshine, but maybe he already knew what I was going to say.
I couldn’t read his face behind those dark glasses, but his mouth opened. From a long way away he said, “Sean…”
Chapter Six
I opened my eyes.
I was lying on the sofa. The ceiling fan whispered above me, the blades swirling in a hypnotic blur. It threw a black shadow flower against the plaster, the petals whirring into a smear.
“Hey, sweetheart.” Dan leaned over me, his face white. Even his lips looked pale. There were little lines around his eyes I didn’t remember seeing before. Poor Dan. Just what he needed after a hard day of chasing bad guys: scraping his crazy boyfriend off the carpet.
I whispered, “Sorry about that.”
He stroked my hair back from my forehead. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
There was, though. Lenny Norman.
I covered my eyes with my arm.
“Don’t, Sean. It’s not your fault.”
Funny how easily he could read my mind.
“No?”
“Christ, no.”
“He thinks he’s helping me.”
But how could Hammond possibly know that I was trying for a role in The Charioteer? How could he know that Lenny Norman stood in the way of what I wanted?
“Whoever is behind this doesn’t think he’s helping you.”
I lowered my arm. “We know who’s behind it. Jesus, tell me we aren’t going to go through this again. You know Hammond did this. He killed the dog and now—”
“Listen to me,” he said, and something in his tone caught my attention. “They found Hammond’s body.”
“They…” I felt winded, like he’d punched me.
“There’s no mistake. Paul Hammond is dead.”
I blinked. I had been so sure.
Dan said, “He must have been thrown from the car when it went off the road. From what the ME could tell, he crawled several yards away from the crash site before he died from internal injuries. They found him in a small gully. Apparently, because the car wound up in the aqueduct, no one thought to canvass the surrounding area.”
I put a hand to my head trying to make sense of this. “There’s no doubt?”
Grimly, Dan said, “I visited the morgue myself to make sure.”
I gathered from his expression that the trip to the morgue had been pretty ghastly; I recognized that this had been done as a favor to me, something I should be grateful for. Instead I felt bewildered.
“Then who shot Lenny Norman?”
“We can’t assume that Norman’s murder is connected to whoever is harassing you. It could have been a jealous boyfriend, a drug deal gone bad; he was not a popular guy. It could have been someone he fired or someone he turned down for a role.”
“You don’t believe that, do you?”
“I know that you believe Norman’s death is too much of a coincidence, but I’m here to tell you that coincidences happen.”
I barely heard him. It was like someone had dumped water on the circuit board of my brain; my thoughts kept shorting out. Norman’s death couldn’t be a coincidence, but how could anyone outside my immediate circle know that I feared he would stop me from getting The Charioteer? Only a handful of people could possibly know I was interested in the role. And killing Norman wasn’t doing me any favors. Most likely the entire production would be cancelled now; the adaptation had been his baby, his project, he had been the one fueling it. So if someone was trying to do me a favor, it was someone who didn’t understand how the film industry ran.
Watching me, Dan asked, “Feel ready to sit up?”
I assented.
He slipped an arm behind me and I sat up, surprised to find that I really needed his help. I felt weak. Shattered.
I stared around the room like I’d never seen it. It was so white. White carpets and white upholstery, white walls—so clinical. Medicinal. Had I picked all this stuff? The seascape over the fireplace, the dark wood furniture and bookshelves. The books themselves. They all looked like they belonged to someone else, someone who lived a long, long way away from me—maybe on another planet.
The only thing that felt real was Dan’s arm around me. Was he afraid I was going to keel over again?
I said, “I need a drink.”
He hesitated. “You don’t want to mix pills and booze.”
“I don’t plan on taking any pills.”
Another pause while he searched for a way to say what he wanted to without antagonizing me. “You might want something to help you sleep. Later.”
I shook my head. He squeezed my shoulder and rose. He was back in a minute with two fingers of brandy in a tumbler. I knocked it back, barely registering the burn down my throat, the heat pooling in my belly. Dan’s hand absently stroked up and down my spine.
“Where’s Markowitz?” I asked, then nearly dropped the glass as the phone rang. “I can’t talk to anyone,” I told Dan.
“I’ve got it.” He rose, and I instantly missed his warmth and strength. Too much.
From that detached distance I listened to him talk. Quiet and clipped. Cop talk. I remembered that I had hung up on Steve. I needed to talk to him. Later. He’d understand that it had to be later.
Dan came back and sat down beside me again. “Norman had an argument with his neighbor last night—and not the first.”
“I don’t believe—”
“Just for the sake of argument, look at these things separately for a minute.”
A thought popped into my head. I interrupted him, asking, “When did you find out Hammond was dead?”
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday?”
No apology, no explanation. Just the facts, ma’am.
Something else didn’t make sense, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I said, “Where did you say Markowitz was?”
Dan nodded toward the front room. “Did you need him for something?”
“No. I don’t need him.”
I woke up with the confused memory of the phone ringing.
The room was in darkness, the shutters closed, drapes drawn. Dan’s side of the bed—he had a side now—was empty. I rolled over in a twist of sheet, checked the clock on the nightstand. Seven thirty. At night? What the hell was I doing in bed? I was supposed to be at dinner with Winston Marshall and Lenny Norman.
It all came flooding back. Steve�
�s phone call and the news Lenny Norman had been murdered. My faint. Then talking with Dan until the alcohol had hit and I’d gone upstairs to lie down. Had I taken pills after that? I didn’t remember, but I felt groggy, doped.
I hadn’t dreamed that single aborted ring, had I?
I picked the phone up and heard Dan talking. “…shock. I don’t want to wake him.”
Steve replied, “I understand, but I think he’ll want to take this call.”
“I’ll tell him you rang as soon as he wakes up.”
Still only half awake, I dropped the handset, had to feel around in the coverlet for it. I put it back against my ear in time to hear Steve saying, “You mean, what you think is best for Sean. Maybe Sean wouldn’t agree.”
“In this five seconds Sean isn’t the best judge of what he needs.”
I blinked at this from a great distance. Did Dan mean that the way it sounded? Because what did that mean? And whatever it meant, it was pretty damn high-handed.
And apparently Steve agreed. He said in a tone I’d never heard before, “But I guess you are?”
I waited for Dan’s answer. He didn’t say anything, which I guess was his answer.
I replaced the phone carefully on the hook. I didn’t feel up to talking to Steve right now, I didn’t feel ready to deal with whatever this new piece of news was, but Steve was right. Dan didn’t have a right to screen my calls. I should be a lot more angry, right? It couldn’t be a good sign that I felt so apathetic; that all I wanted to do was roll over and go back to sleep.
Maybe Dan wasn’t so far off base. Maybe I wasn’t as well as I believed. My stomach twisted into knots of anxiety.
But anyone would be shocked about murder, right? And death threats, that would take a toll on anyone.
Wasn’t I basically stressing over how stressed I was? In fact, this was really sort of funny if I looked at it in just the right way.
Yep, hysterical. And if I started laughing, I’d never stop.
Say I did crack up again, what would happen with Dan and me? Nobody was going to hang in there for that. You couldn’t expect it. I tried to picture Dan driving down on visiting days to have lunch with me in my bathrobe.
I hugged the pillow and buried my face in the cool cotton. It smelled good. Like Dan.
* * * * *
I jerked awake to furtive rustling sounds.
“It’s me.” Dan spoke from near the window. “I didn’t want to startle you with the light.”
Right, because creepy sounds in the darkness were a lot less alarming.
“What time is it?”
“About three in the morning.” His shadow passed through the bars of moonlight. The mattress dipped on his side of the bed. I could hear the fatigue in his voice. “Do you need anything? You didn’t eat dinner. Do you want some scrambled eggs?”
“No.”
“A hot drink?”
I had a sudden and totally inexplicable longing for the hot cocoa and plain animal cookies my mom used to fix me when I was a little kid and feeling sick or sad. I hadn’t seen or spoken to my mother in five years. Not since the memorable lunch where she’d spent the first half reassuring me that there were doctors and clinics and therapies to help me get over being gay, and the second half crying about what she and my father could have done to deserve a son like me.
Two days later I’d checked myself into the hospital for a few weeks of R&R. But, it only took a day for me to realize that being depressed or nervous didn’t mean I wasn’t safe with the cutlery. The first step had been learning to trust myself. The second step had been putting a healthy distance between me and my family.
“Nothing,” I told Dan. And then belatedly, “Thanks.”
He lay back with a sigh. “Jesus, what a fucked up day,” he muttered. I don’t think he meant to say it aloud. I’d never heard him sound so drained.
I lifted my head. “Are you okay? Can I get you something?”
He said huskily, “I could really use a hug right about now.”
For a sec I didn’t think I’d heard him right. I was so used to him being the caretaker that it didn’t occur to me that he might occasionally need solace—or that I’d be the person best qualified to offer it.
“Hey,” I whispered, and reached for him. His arms locked around me. I wasn’t exactly sure who was hugging whom. I rested my cheek against the soft crispness of his hair, kissed him lightly. His breath was warm against my ear. Toothpaste and a hint of the coffee he’d had earlier. He inhaled sharply. Held me even tighter.
“I love the way you smell,” he whispered.
I smiled a little. Gave him another of those tiny stray kisses. After a few minutes, I felt his body relaxing against mine, growing heavy and drowsy. It was unexpectedly comforting. I held him until I too gave into sleep.
I slept late the next morning. Dan was gone by the time I wandered into the front room.
Markowitz sat on the couch reading Variety. Maria was scouring the granite countertops. She looked up, smiling with false brightness when I walked into the kitchen.
“Buenos días!”
“Morning.” I opened the fridge. Took out the jug of orange juice.
“I make you breakfast, Mr. Fairchild,” Maria said, handing me a glass. Her soft brown eyes looked worried. Why was she worried?
“How about if I make you breakfast,” I said. “Markowitz, would you like breakfast?”
“I had a couple of Pop Tarts before I left the house,” Markowitz said from behind the newspaper.
“Me, I’m dieting,” Maria said.
That made it unanimous. I drank my orange juice watching Mrs. Wilgi walking the beach. A little speck danced in front of her. A puppy.
I sat down and turned on the TV, flipping channels ‘til I found a local station. I sat through two morning talk shows with celebrity guests—all of them much younger and prettier than me—cartoons I didn’t recognize, and finally a news update on Lenny Norman.
Police were questioning a neighbor with whom he’d had a long-running feud. And that was about it. Norman had been shot to death late Monday night. His bullet-riddled body had been found by his gardener Tuesday morning.
News at eleven. Eleven a.m. because it wasn’t very important news, the murder of one small-time indie director. Few, if any, of the at home viewers were going to recognize his film credits.
“The victim was killed by three shots from a 9 mm semiautomatic,” announced the perky blond reporter in her faux trench coat.
I said to Markowitz, who had lowered the paper for this news flash, “That’s the old police issue, isn’t it?” I knew Dan still carried a Beretta M9, though a lot of cops had switched to Glocks.
“I prefer the grip of a Beretta,” Markowitz said quite civilly. “They’ve been having problems with the Glock 21s.”
From the kitchen, Maria made clucking noises. “You don’t want feel your head with that bad stuff, Mr. Fairchild!”
The phone rang. My keepers exchanged looks.
I uncurled out of the overstuffed chair. “I’ve got it,” I said. I picked up before the answering machine.
“Dude, is that you?” Steve sounded unusually subdued.
“Yes.” I glanced at Maria. “I’ll take this upstairs.”
She nodded.
I ran upstairs, picked up, and said into the phone, “You can hang up now, Maria.” I waited for the clatter of the phone settling back on the hook, and then said, “What’s up?”
“Is everything okay?”
“Of course.”
“I tried to call last night.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I was kind of out of it last night.”
“Yeah. I heard.”
Awkward pause.
“Well, listen,” Steve said finally, “I’ve got some news. I think it’s good news. Winston Marshall called me this morning. He’s going ahead with The Charioteer. He’s already talked to Bruce Watts about replacing Lenny Norman as director, and the first person Bruce mentioned when he heard t
he Laurie role hadn’t been cast yet was you.”
“Bruce is going to direct?” Bruce Watts had directed my last two films. He was wonderful to work with, an actor’s director.
“The part’s yours if you still want it.”
“If I still want it? Of course I still want it!”
“Are you sure, Sean? Because there are other films and other parts.”
“What are you talking about? I want this part. I want this film.”
Steve, sounding totally unlike himself, said, “Okay, but are you…sure you’re up to it?”
“Hell, yes, I’m up to it.” The realization of what he was really saying hit me in the gut. “Why don’t you just say what’s on your mind, Steve?”
Clearly uncomfortable, he forged on. “Yeah, well, Dan and I talked last night. He said that you might not be…strong enough to go back to work so soon.”
I was holding the receiver so hard I thought it might crack. “He said what?”
“Well, with all this shit going on. First Hammond and then this other lunatic and then thinking Hammond was this other lunatic. You have to admit you have been under a lot of strain. I mean, no wonder if you’re emotionally fragile.”
I felt like I couldn’t get my breath. “Dan said I was emotionally fragile?”
Silence.
“Steve? Is that what Dan said? That I’m emotionally fragile?”
Steve said in an uncomfortable rush, “I think he’s worried, Sean. I mean, we all are. But…Dan especially.”
“What else did he say?” I had hung the phone up too quickly last night. No wonder Maria and Markowitz were giving me funny looks this morning.
“That you—” He bit it off.
“That I what? Jesus! Tell me what the fuck he said!”
Steve spoke like the words were being dragged out of him one at a time. “He thought that maybe we should talk to you together. Convince you to get yourself admitted to UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Hospital.”