KW 09:Shot on Location

by Laurence Shames

  He held the phone away as if it carried a disease and pushed the little red button. Pushing the little red button did not quite have the cathartic power of slamming down a receiver, but still, it was emphatic enough that Jake’s hand trembled just a bit. He waded to the edge of the pool and slid the phone along the tiles. Then he submerged. Just sat down at the bottom to hide out for a moment.

  When he surfaced Bryce was standing nearby. He said, “Well, I guess you told him.”

  Jake blinked chlorine from his eyes and glanced up at the sky. Gulls were wheeling, a squad of pelicans was scudding by. Sure enough, things were starting to look a little different here. What mattered, what didn’t. What was bullshit, what was real. Suddenly pleased with himself, Jake said, “Yeah, I guess I did.” And he slipped back underwater for a while.

  13.

  Some minutes later, while he was drying off in caressing sunshine, Jake got another call. It was Claire Segal.

  Seeming to savor the whole idea, she said, “I heard you just hung up on Quentin.”

  “He tells you everything?”

  “Not hardly. He doesn’t tell anybody everything. Did it feel good?”

  “Hanging up? Yeah, it did.”

  “I’m envious. Anyway, he asked me to call to apologize.”

  Jake wasn’t sure he’d heard right. Maybe he still had water in his ear. “Wait a second. I hung up on him. And he’s the one apologizing?”

  “That’s right.”

  Disarmed, Jake fumbled for a moment then said, “Well, that’s nice of him.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “It’s pragmatic. Classic Quentin. He can’t afford to piss you off.”

  “Still, to apologize —”

  “What? It costs him nothing. He has no pride. No, that’s not exactly right. He prides himself on getting what he needs from people. Doesn’t matter how. Charm, threats, tantrums, apologies. He makes himself big or makes himself little. Whatever gets him where he needs to go.”

  Jake said, “I think you’ve just described a textbook sociopath.”

  “Maybe. But why stick a label on it? He’s a successful producer. He’s obsessed and he needs to be obsessed. Nothing really exists for him except the show. Not me, not you, not Donna. It may not be pretty, but there it is.”

  Jake draped a towel over his head and thought it over. “Okay, I get it. Sort of. Tell him I accept his apology. But I still think he’s an insensitive dick.”

  Claire laughed. “I’ll tell him. He won’t care. But he won’t forget either. When he doesn’t need you anymore, look out. But another thing. We’re not shooting tomorrow. Everybody’s too upset.”

  “My, how human.”

  “Come on, don’t judge us all by Quentin. I’m wondering if you might like to have lunch with me.”

  Caught off guard, Jake hesitated.

  “Don’t get all hot and bothered,” she said. “It’s just an innocent invitation for some seafood and a chat. I’m surrounded by kids here, chronological and emotional. I get a little starved for grown-up company. Can we say Louie’s Backyard, one o’clock?”

  ---

  At another fancy marina, this one at the north end of Key Largo, another fancy speedboat was being carefully tied into its berth. This craft was a sort of mica black flecked with metallic glints of forest green and midnight blue. Its dark windshield, now washed clean of spray, was molded and raked back like that of an Indy car. Roped off like a captured beast, the swelling hull still seemed to be straining forward, itching to climb the water as though it were a mountainside.

  A man stepped off the boat. There was nothing remotely thuggish about him and in fact he was a very handsome man who looked considerably younger than his sixty or so years. His face and neck were beautifully tanned, just slightly leathery but in a way that flattered his flinty eyes. He wore pleated khaki shorts that ended just above his well-toned knees and a tidy polo shirt with a prestigious logo on the chest. His leather-laced boat shoes were the classic brand, and his salt-and-pepper hair was neither too short nor too long. There was a certain archaic elegance in the style of it; it lay in perfect waves, each a finger’s breadth from the next, the way that 1940s crooners used to wear their hair.

  The man walked up the dock, said cordial hellos to fellow boaters who were oiling teak or polishing brass or fiddling with balky engines. These other people called him Johnny and seemed proud he’d noticed them, glad of his attention. He continued on through the marina gate and toward a waterside restaurant called Handsome Johnny’s Crab Joint. It was the tail end of lunchtime but the terrace tables were still full. He looked with an uneasy mix of satisfaction and contempt at the tourists in their lobster bibs, clumsily wielding picks and crackers, then he smoothly slipped into his purported place of business and disappeared from sight.

  14.

  Joey Goldman had grown up in a tenement in Queens. His wife, Sandra Dugan, had lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn. Their home in Key West was therefore the fulfillment of a fantasy held by cramped apartment dwellers everywhere. It was mostly open space and windows. Glass doors slid aside to welcome in a safe and mild world. Skylights tracked the weather and the progress of the sun and moon. You stepped into that house and you felt sheltered but not trapped. There were plenty of ways to get out again.

  Their backyard felt bigger than it really was. The shimmer from the pool somehow seemed to stretch the space above it. Patches of color — soft blue skyflower, flame red nicotiana — coaxed the eye from place to place. Small groupings of furniture created a cozy array of places to sit.

  In one of those groupings, poolside, an old man was reclining with a chihuahua on his lap. The man had white hair, still quite thick, tinged with yellow at the upturning edges. He had black eyes set well back in their sockets and an enormous but stately nose that shaded one side of his face as if it were a sundial. He wore a resplendent linen shirt, lavender with navy piping on the placket and around the pockets; the same color had been used for his monogram, B d’A, done in fancy script. His long bony fingers encircled the little dog, sometimes petting it, other times just holding on.

  He was scratching it behind the ears when Joey, who’d sprung up to answer the doorbell, came back into the yard with a fresh bottle of Chianti in his hand and their other dinner guest at his side. “Bert,” he said, “meet Jake Benson. Jake, meet my oldest friend down here, Bert d’Ambrosia. First guy I met. Then it turned out he knew my father, my mother, my whole family from New York. Small world, right?”

  Bert extended a veiny hand and said, “’Scuse me if I don’t get up. Takes a while. Plus I got the stupid dog. This here’s Don Giovanni. Say hello, Giovanni.”

  The dog allowed the old man to lift and wave its tiny paw. Then it licked the flat and reddish place where once upon a time its balls had been.

  Joey sat, poured wine all around, and said to Jake, “I was just telling Bert about this craziness with Donna and the boat. Wanted to see what he made of it.”

  Bert ate an olive then dabbed his full lips on a napkin. “What’s to make? It’s a big fuckin’ ocean out there. You got one broad swimmin’ innee the ocean. You got one boat ridin’ onnee ocean. They end up in the exact same spot at the exact same time. Coincidence?”

  “It’s a stretch,” said Joey. “But it’s tough to see —”

  “What? A motive? Crazy fuckin’ world, who needs a motive anymore? People feel like runnin’ someone over, they do it. Wha’d you say this girl’s last name is?”

  “Alvarez.”

  “From Miami, right? Cuban probably. They got their issues. The Castro bullshit. The smuggling bullshit.” To Jake he said, “You know this Donna person?”

  “Just met last night. Strange circumstance. I was drunk. She was naked.”

  “Match made in heaven,” the old man said.

  “Nothing happened. We talked.”

  Bert sipped some wine, then, as was becoming an ever more frequent occurrence, his mind
skipped back to what he’d been saying before. “Yeah, the Cubans, they have their little wars, their little squabbles with certain people I used to know. Plus, from what you said about the boat--Cigarette or something close, right?”

  “Big, fast, and dark,” Jake put in.

  “Ya see, that tells me something. That’s not a boat that citizens take for a spin on a weekday morning. That’s a working boat, if you catch my drift.” He’d put his hands back on the dog. Now he turned his big face down and spoke to it. “You and me, we’ve took some rides on boats like that, ain’t we, Giovanni.”

  The dog flicked out a quick pink tongue and kissed the old man on the tip of his giant nose.

  Jake drank some wine and hid behind his glass a moment. He needed some time to gather his thoughts. He knew it was improbable, ridiculous, but he couldn’t help thinking that Joey’s best friend Bert looked more than a little bit like an old Mafioso. He talked more than a little bit like an old Mafioso. And he brought out more of an Outer Borough accent in Joey than Jake had noticed before; a hint of social club accent almost. Then again, Jake’s imagination tended to run away with him; professional hazard, after all. But he couldn’t help mulling the possibility, and Bert d’Ambrosia somehow seemed to sense him mulling it. When Jake lowered the wineglass from his face, the two men shared a fleeting but entirely candid glance.

  Jake’s eyes asked: Are you?

  Bert’s twinkling gaze and merest hint of a sly smile said: Yeah, what of it?

  Jake briefly wondered why he wasn’t more uneasy or surprised, why this latest wrinkle simply struck him as one more thing that might happen in Key West. Was it just the heat? The haze of humidity that blurred sharp edges and usual assumptions? He held Bert’s stare a heartbeat longer, until Sandra appeared in the open doorway and called over to Joey. “Can you give me a hand in here? I’m cooking on four burners.”

  ---

  Inside the airy kitchen, water was heating for pasta. Spinach was sautéing. Garlic was slowly toasting and tomatoes were cooking down, farting out a viscous bubble now and then. Joey picked up a wooden spoon and started stirring.

  “How’s Bert tonight?” asked Sandra, brushing back a wisp of caramel-colored hair from her forehead. Just past forty, Sandra didn’t look her age and never had. Twenty years in the Keys and her skin was still smooth and unfreckled.

  Just slightly defensively, Joey said, “He’s fine. Sharp as a tack.”

  “He still calling the dog by the wrong name?”

  “Sandra, what does it matter what he calls the dog?”

  “It worries me, that’s all.”

  It worried Joey too but he fought against admitting it. “You think the dog cares what he calls it? Six months ago dog was on death row, one bowl of kibble from the gas chamber. He’s happy to be called anything. Plus he had a stupid name before. Nacho. That’s like, whaddyacallit, racial profiling. Mexican dog, name him after an appetizer. That’s not right.”

  Sandra said, “I’m not talking about the dog’s ethnic background, okay? I’m talking about Bert. I sometimes worry he’s not so with it anymore. That he’s living in the past.”

  Reluctantly, Joey said, “On this one thing, maybe. Other than that, he’s sharp, he’s fine.”

  Sandra said nothing. Joey stirred tomatoes. Agitated, he stirred them a little too hard so that hot red starbursts shot over the edges of the pan. After a moment he went on, “Come on, Sandra, guy’s almost ninety, he’s entitled to a little … a little, let’s call it eccentricity.”

  His wife just leaned over and kissed him softly on the cheek.

  15.

  “We need something sexy,” the publicist was saying. Her name was Jacqueline Mayfield. She was six-foot-one, African American, and well on her way to becoming legendary for her persuasiveness. Her secret for getting the media to do her bidding was that she didn’t just convey a message, she became the message. She put her whole self into it, and everything about her whole self was commanding and large. Big shoulders, big hips, big voice, big smile, big scowl, big laugh. “A random, non-fatal accident just isn’t sexy,” she went on. “An injury to a stuntwoman just isn’t sexy.”

  “Inconveniently, though,” Claire Segal say dryly, “an accidental injury to a stuntwoman is what happened.”

  “Maybe,” said Jacqueline. “But come on. We all know there’s a difference between what happened and what the story is.”

  They were meeting in Jacqueline’s suite at The Nest, the discreet and elegant boutique hotel where the more important people from Adrift were housed. Rob Stanton, the director, was at the meeting, along with a couple of key cast members. Quentin Dole and several suits from the network were video-conferenced in from Los Angeles; their slightly distorted faces swam and smeared across computer screens; they looked like fish bumping their noses against the glass of an aquarium.

  One of the suits, his words just slightly lagging the blurry movement of his lips, said, “I think what’s right in front of us is pretty damn good. Classic human interest. The stuntwoman — what’s her name again? — she’s a perfect unsung hero.”

  Jacqueline was shaking her big impressive head. “Hold that thought. Unsung. The little people behind the stars. That’s old. That’s a one-day story. We can do better than that.”

  “We better do better than that,” said another of the suits. He leaned forward as he said it so that his swooping face looked both menacing and entirely goofy. “Look, the show’s losing momentum. Ratings have been flat the last three weeks.”

  “Flat at a damn high level,” put in another executive.

  “Flat is flat,” came the reply. “And flat today is down tomorrow. We don’t a need a cuddly little human interest segment, we need some real heat.”

  The first suit still liked his own idea. “Can we get a crew into the hospital? That’d be great! You see this woman, the I.V. stuff, maybe in traction, some bandages on her head, you realize, Wow, people risk their lives to make this show …”

  “What people?” said Jacqueline. “Who’s risking their life? That’s what we need to be asking. If it’s just some acrobat that no one’s ever heard of who gets dinged up on the job, that’s not much of a story.”

  “She’s not an acrobat,” said Claire. “She’s a good actress who does stunts. And she’s not dinged up. She almost died.”

  “But she didn’t,” said the publicist. “Amen. So can we please get back to what we’re doing here?”

  There was a somewhat frosty pause.

  Finally, Quentin Dole spoke up. His lean face looked very bony on the computer screen and his glasses were halfway between light and dark, somewhat iridescent. He said, “I like what I’m hearing from Jacqueline, but please let’s back up a step. Let’s think about some context. Not so much what happened, but how it happened, why it happened. What was Donna doing when the accident occurred?”

  No one wanted to risk a wrong answer and for a moment no one spoke. Then one of the suits ventured, “Swimming?”

  “Very good,” said Quentin wiltingly. “That would be the activity most often associated with getting run over by a boat. But I don’t think that’s the part that matters here. What matters is the role she was playing. She was doubling for Candace.”

  Claire said, “Now wait a second —”

  Quentin didn’t. “She was dressed like Candace. She had the wig on. She was continuing a scene that Candace had started —”

  “Bingo,” said Jacqueline. “There’s our story.”

  “Bullshit,” said Claire. “That’s not our story. It’s nonsense. It’s a lie. It’s irresponsible.”

  “I like it,” said one of the suits.

  “It isn’t irresponsible,” Quentin said. “It’s just spin. Jacqueline’s right. What’s more interesting? A stunt girl has an accident, or maybe it wasn’t an accident and the victim was supposed to be our star?”

  “That’s the way to go,” said Jacqueline. “Definitely. It’ll be the lead on all the daytime programs, all the ma
gazines.”

  “Quentin,” said Claire, “you can’t do this. This is not the fucking show. This is real. Someone got hurt.”

  Ignoring her, one of the suits said, “We just have to keep it a what if kind of thing. Nothing too specific. Otherwise we’ll never get it past Legal.”

  “Yeah, perfect,” said Jacqueline. “Just raise the possibility. Plant a seed. Leave it open-ended. Same way the show leaves things open-ended. Get that echo going.”

  Claire said, “This is sick.”

  One of the suits said, “This is great. The whole country’ll be talking about it. People who’ve never even seen the show will be talking about it.”

  Rob Stanton said, “Wait a second. Aren’t we forgetting something? Someone’s feelings?”

  The notion seemed to usher in a moment of abashed silence. People dropped each other’s eyes like hot pans. Then the director went on.

  “You okay with this, Candace? Concocting this rumor that maybe someone’s trying to kill you?”

  The star didn’t answer right away but chose to milk the scene. She pursed then licked her sensuous lips. She blinked her violet eyes and let them drift out of focus into some dreamy middle distance. She began to speak then stopped, as if the words were costing her too much. Finally, in a voice barely above a whisper, she said, “Someone is.”

  For a moment no one breathed. The publicist silently put down the pen she’d been holding. The smeared faces on the computer screens were studies in bewilderment.

  Then, with a hack of a laugh, one of the suits said, “Isn’t she terrific? Look at that, she’s on board in a heartbeat. She could sell that story to anyone.”

  Uneasily, people swayed toward joining in the laugh but didn’t get quite as far as laughing.

  Without raising her eyes, Candace said, “It isn’t just a story. I think someone’s trying to kill me.”

  The suit who’d been laughing went silent with the others. Quentin Dole and Jacqueline Mayfield looked past each other like people lost in a cave.

  Then Candace laughed. The laugh was cloaked in geniality but it was a mocking laugh, a reveling in her skill at fakery, her capacity to fool. Throwing back her rich black hair, she said, “Had you going, didn’t I?”