KW 09:Shot on Location

by Laurence Shames

  So Claire filled him on the story of the betrayal and the suicide and the stalking. “But still,” she went on, “there’s two things I can’t figure. How she got a copy of the script. And how she planted the scorpion in the middle of the night.”

  Jake let his head rest on the blanket. The warm sand seemed to loosen up his brain and something clicked. He said, “Hold on. I bet I know how she got the script. Donna’s boyfriend stole it for her. Except he didn’t know it was for her. He was hired by a middle man. It was just a job.”

  It was Claire’s turn to be bewildered. “How you know all that?”

  “He told me.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Ace. The boyfriend.”

  “But I thought —”

  So he related his adventures of the night before. At the close of the recitation, she said, “With a Dustbuster?”

  “What can I say? It’s what we had handy.”

  There was a pause. The sun shone down. The waves hissed softly as they vanished. Here and there along the beach, people hit balls with paddles or chucked around a soggy football. Claire started doodling in the sand with a fingertip. She seemed to be working out some sort of diagram but it was unclear what it illustrated. “Okay,” she said at last, “let’s think this through. As of yesterday, you thought the boyfriend took the script so he could hit Donna with the speedboat. As revenge for dumping him.”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought. I don’t think it anymore.”

  “But now it looks like whoever has the script was really going after Candace.”

  “Yes,” Jake agreed, “that’s how it looks. Assuming you’re right about the scorpion.”

  “But the fact remains that Donna has also been hurt.”

  “True.”

  “So what’s the connection between Donna getting run over and Candace getting stung?”

  “I haven’t got a fucking clue.”

  As if exhausted by the puzzle, or maybe just cozened by the lapping water and the sand that molded itself beneath his body, Jake let his eyes fall closed. Claire did the same. The moment seemed so easy that the intimacy of it almost went unnoticed: two people, side by side, trusting to closed eyes and quiet in each other’s company.

  It was a wonderful respite but it couldn’t last. There were too many questions tugging at the edges of it as at the corners of a quilt. Lifting his head, plunging, in spite of himself, back into the fray, Jake began, “So if the sister planted the scorpion, presumably she has a boat.”

  “Presumably,” said Claire.

  “And if she has a boat, she might also have been the one to run over Donna.”

  “But why would she? Her grudge is with Candace.”

  “Exactly. And Donna was doubling for Candace when she got hit.”

  “True. But this person has a script and schedule. The schedule lists the personnel for every shot. I mean, it’s certainly possible that it was just a dumb mistake —”

  “Or maybe not a mistake,” Jake put in. “Maybe something else. A warning. A threat.”

  “Or a tease,” Claire said. “This woman seems to like to tease.”

  Jake’s scalp felt tight from thinking. He rubbed his head. As a bit of an afterthought, he said, “So how’s she doing? Candace, I mean.”

  “Oh, she’s fine. Those stings apparently hurt like hell but aren’t really dangerous. She fainted, but only from the shock. I cleaned it out with ammonia, gave her some antihistamines. She’ll be fine.”

  Jake said, “First aid is your job too?”

  “Everything’s my job. I’m getting really sick of it.”

  “Does she know about the paper you found? The page from the script.”

  Claire shook her head. “I didn’t tell her. I didn’t tell anyone. What would be the point? She’d be even more scared and the publicity people would have more grist for their bullshit story about the diva being targeted.”

  “Except,” said Jake, “now it sounds like she really is.”

  In a tone more bemused than bitter, Claire said, “Whaddya know. Life imitates spin. Welcome to the entertainment business. On another subject, your shoulders are getting really red. Did you put sunblock on?”

  “I forgot,” he admitted. As an experiment, he poked a finger into the flesh at the top of his arm. The skin went dead white for a moment then flushed a hot angry orange-pink.

  Claire reached into her bag and came out with a plastic bottle that she dangled in front of him. There followed one of those unemphatic but decisive moments that generally go unrecorded in a life, moments when some tiny gesture or lack thereof divides time into before and after and changes the trajectory of much that follows. Jake didn’t take the bottle. He bided his time. He waited. And after a breath or two Claire squirted sunblock into her own hand and prepared to rub it onto his skin.

  He pancaked flat against the sand, closed his eyes, exhaled, and opened himself to the pleasure of her touch. She anointed his neck and shoulders. Her fingers lightly kneaded the tops of his arms and then the palm of her hand bumped notch by notch over the vertebrae of his lean back. At times her touch was so light that he imagined he could feel the tiny whorls and ridges of her fingerprints; now and then he felt the hard tips of her nails just barely scratching at his flesh, holding the faraway promise of a tighter clasp sometime. He lay as still and quiet as he could, not wanting the luxury to end. When it finally did, he craned his neck around to smile at the woman kneeling over him. “This is starting to feel a little like a date,” he said.

  “Maybe just a little,” she admitted. But then, jarringly, she added, “I think we need to find that crazy sister.”

  35.

  Meanwhile, at the compound that day, all was peace and domesticity. The pool pump softly hummed; birds chirped and warbled. Bryce in his phlegmatic way was trimming shrubbery. Now and then he actually made a snip with the shears; the rest of the time he just stood there and admired the mysterious spiral patterns by which the leaves and fronds unfolded.

  Joey stopped by, together with Bert and the misnamed chihuahua, and was pleased to find Donna safe and reasonably sound, sitting in an umbrella-shaded lounge chair near the hot tub. He asked how she was feeling.

  “Like the fucking Queen of England,” she said. “Ace is taking care of me.”

  Behind the blue-lensed sunglasses, Joey could not help flinching.

  Bert, seeming a bit confused, said, “Ace? Isn’t that the guy we thought was gonna kill you yesterday?”

  “It’s fine,” said Donna. “He loves me. He admits it now.”

  When Joey’s face stayed skeptical, Donna gestured toward her feet.

  “You don’t believe it? Look at my toenails. Bert, check out those goddamn cuticles. Gorgeous, right? He gave me a pedicure. I told him I was depressed about my toenails. They looked like shit and I couldn’t bend over to do them. So he did my toenails for me. On his hands and knees. I think that says something about the man. Don’t you?”

  Just then the gate swung open and Ace stepped through, his massive body largely hidden by two swelling bags of groceries. Celery leaves and beet greens and carrot tops poked out of the sacks, reaching right up to his nose.

  “Now he’s gonna make me juice,” whispered Donna, with just a hint of smugness. “Aren’t you, honey?” she said in a voice that wafted sweetly across the gravel path. “Aren’t you gonna make me some nice veggie juice?”

  “Anything you say, baby. Anything to get you all fixed up.”

  He walked over and said a surprisingly cordial hello to Joey. With some effort, Joey managed to respond more or less in kind. Then he introduced Bert. Ace heard the name, saw what the old man was wearing — a peach-colored silk pullover with parrot-green placket, sleeve trim, and monogram — and did a double-take, the way one does when walking down an ordinary street and seeing a celebrity. He said, “Bert? As in Bert the Shirt? Bert d’Ambrosia?”

  “The same.”

  “Hey, I hearda you.”

  Bert looked down
, almost shyly, but he beamed. As a young man it had been so important to him to be taken seriously. Then for a brief time he’d wanted to be feared. Now, as an old man, all he asked or hoped for was to be a little bit remembered.

  “You’re like a legend,” Ace went on. “The guy who was allowed to retire from the Mob.”

  Petting his dog, Bert said modestly, “I got out on a technicality. I died.”

  “Died?”

  “Heart attack. Courthouse steps. Ambulance. Flat-line onna graph. I figured I fulfilled my oath: Come in living, go out dead.”

  Admiringly, wistfully, Ace said, “But you got out. That’s the main thing. Hey, I’d really like to talk with you. Can you stick around a while? I gotta put these groceries away. Anybody want some veggie juice?”

  ---

  Jacqueline Mayfield, the whirlwind publicist, had been summoned back to L.A. on an early morning flight. As instructed, she went straight to Quentin’s office from the airport, and she found him looking awful. His complexion was sallow. There seemed to be more hints of gray hair on his temples than there’d been just a few days before. Behind his tint-shifting glasses, his eyes sagged slightly downward toward liver-colored sacs. Before he even said hello he said, “It isn’t working.”

  “What isn’t working?”

  “None of it. Come in and close the door.”

  She stepped into the office. It was very L.A., large and bright yet still managing to be cheerless, sterile. White walls, glass shelves, two big windows overlooking Wilshire Boulevard. But there were no personal effects, no family photos, no goofy souvenirs. It was a lair beyond the reach of sentiment; it offered no clues about the person who worked in it and it killed nostalgia in advance. If a shift in fortunes were to sweep the current occupant from the privileged space, the walls would bear no memory that he had ever been there.

  Jacqueline had barely settled into a chrome and leather chair when the producer went on. “The whole publicity angle,” he pronounced, “has been a failure.”

  The publicist took this personally of course but saw no advantage in letting it show. Calmly, she said, “I thought it was going pretty well.”

  “Very well,” he said, “if you were working for Candace McBride. But you’re not. You work for me.”

  Jacqueline didn’t like his tone at all. “I work for the show. You came up with this approach. I did everything I was asked to do to launch it, and more.”

  Quentin didn’t disagree but he didn’t give ground either. He gestured toward the stack of ratings reports and media clippings on his desk. “And this is the result. Candace is quickly becoming a household name and our numbers are going backwards.”

  “Backwards? Come on, it was a tiny bit of an off week. There’s probably a lot of other factors--”

  The producer didn’t want to hear about the other factors. “Flops,” he said, “are made of just slightly off weeks strung together. I’m not going to sit here and wait for that to happen. We’re reversing course.”

  “Reversing course?”

  “We’re pulling the plug on all publicity involving Candace. No interviews, no appearances, no nothing.”

  “Quentin, wait a second. I’ve got like six more spots already lined up.”

  “Cancel them.”

  “I can’t cancel them. The shows are scheduled. The magazines are holding space. People will be furious.”

  “Good. Blame Candace. Say she cancelled everything. Say she’s just too difficult. Make her poison.”

  Jacqueline folded her big hands in her big lap and took a moment to stare out the window. She searched for temperate words but then said what she thought. “That’d be a really pricky thing to do.”

  “Pricky? No. Practical. We built her up, we can bring her back to size.”

  “But why? I think you’re making way too much of this one little blip. Can we please slow down a second? Can we talk it over?”

  “No.”

  “Have you run it by the suits, at least?”

  Quentin had laid his hands flat on his desk and he now leaned over them and pressed as if doing some peculiar sort of pushup. Sinews stood out in his neck and the skin went white at the edges of his eyes. When he spoke again his voice was thin and shrill. “I don’t need to run it by the suits! You don’t talk to the suits when the numbers are bad.”

  “They aren’t bad,” Jacqueline quietly insisted. “They’re just a little —”

  “They’re bad!” Quentin yelled, slapping his desk and making pens and papers jump as he said so. The outburst left a queasy silence in its wake.

  Very softly, Jacqueline said, “Are you all right?”

  It was meant as a kindness but to the producer it seemed an intrusion and an affront. He shot his publicist an acidic glance. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m running a show. I’m taking care of business. There’s a lot you just don’t understand.”

  “Apparently.”

  The simple dry remark seemed to mollify him somewhat.

  “Listen,” he said, “this is an ensemble show. It doesn’t work to have someone break out of the pack the way she has.”

  Finally unable to contain her exasperation, Jacqueline swelled in her chair and said, “Then why’d I work my ass off to make that happen?”

  Scrambling now, as he did when cornered, Quentin said, “It was … let’s call it an interim strategy. But it’s over now. It’s changing. We’re going to be playing off of it, giving it a twist.”

  “A twist?”

  “The Lulu character will be getting less important.”

  “Less important? And when did this get decided?”

  The producer didn’t answer, since it hadn’t really been decided until he said it.

  “Less important?” the publicist said again. “After the way we’ve put her front and center? That makes no sense.”

  “Oh but it does,” said Dole, picking up momentum. “It makes perfect sense. It brings the focus back to the group. To the show itself. Don’t you see?”

  There was a pause. Quentin reached quickly for a pen, grabbed a random piece of paper and excitedly began to scribble down notes.

  More animated now, he went on, “From here on in she recedes, she shrinks. There’s a lesson in it, part of the mythology. She put herself before the group, and there are consequences. Serious consequences. Maybe … maybe she even has to die.”

  “Die? You’d kill off the most popular character? You’d write her out of the show?”

  The producer no longer seemed to be listening. His head was down, his glasses were glinting light and dark, and he just kept scrawling notes. Jacqueline watched him for a while then slipped out of the office. He didn’t seem to notice that she’d left.

  36.

  Claire’s luxurious rubbing of sunblock into Jake’s neck and back and shoulders had given rise to some lovely daydreams full of promise but had come too late to spare him from a sunburn. By the time he got back to the compound, his skin felt papery, he itched around his hairline, and he had owlish pale circles where his sunglasses had been.

  On a mission, he rolled the purple bike into its accustomed slot and went straight over to Donna’s cottage, where he discovered a somewhat improbable tableau. Donna was sprawled out on the sofa, regally propped on pillows, sipping something green through a straw. She had a chihuahua on her lap, its chin and paws propped on her thigh. Bert the Shirt was relaxing in a love seat next to her, taking little nips of the same green liquid and trying to look happy about it. Ace was in the kitchen. He was wearing a pink apron printed with a pattern of little blue pots and pans that seemed to be floating gently through space. The apron covered only a narrow swath of his torso and its strings barely stretched around his back. He was deeply involved in an elaborate process of breading fish fillets, first bathing them in egg, then dredging them in flour, then egg again, then bread crumbs.

  After a round of greetings, Jake said, “Sorry to barge in like this, but Ace, we have to talk.”

  Before Ace could a
nswer, Donna said, “Would you like some veggie juice?”

  “No. No thank you.”

  Ace said, “How about a beer?”

  “Sure. Yeah. That’d be great.”

  Nodding toward the fridge, the big man said, “Help yourself. I’m all covered with egg and shit.”

  Jake grabbed a beer. “Thanks. But listen, there’s something we have to--”

  “Want to stay for dinner?” Donna asked. “Ace is really a good cook. We were just talking about that, saying that’s what he should do from now on. Cook. Be a chef. Bert thinks it’s a good idea. Don’t you, Bert?”

  “Lotta tough guys cook good.”

  “Ace’s Place,” Donna said. “Good name, right? Can’t you just see it, Jake?”

  Absently, Jake said, “Yeah. Great idea. But the reason I came over —”

  “Try some grouper. You’ll see how good it is.”

  “The reason I came over is that I need to know who hired Ace to grab that script.”

  Donna groaned and shifted on her pillows. “Oh Christ, this is where I was afraid you were going. This again?”

  “Yeah, this again.”

  Ace dangled a fillet above a frying pan then gently swung it so that it made a perfect entry into the bubbling butter. Within seconds a heady fragrance filled the cottage.

  Still trying to deflect, Donna said, “He puts nutmeg in the breadcrumbs. That’s the secret.”

  “Fascinating. But about the script —”

  Patiently, Ace said, “I thought we been through this. I don’t think it’s a good idea I tell ya.”

  “Maybe it’s a good idea, maybe it isn’t. But it’s important.”

  Ace didn’t ruffle. It was Donna who got exasperated. “For fuck’s sake, Jake, everything’s fine now. Why are you still —”

  “Because everything isn’t fine. Look, no offense, but I used to think Ace was the bad guy here. If he was, this would have been a pretty simple story. But he isn’t. So the story turns out way more complicated.”

  “Story?” Donna said. “You think of all this as a story?”

  Jake might have blushed but it was hard to tell through the sunburn. He felt a little caught, like the way he’d felt when Donna had seen him watching her swim naked. He said, “Sorry, I think of everything as a story. It’s just my way. My way of trying to make sense of things.”