“And an excellent judge of character,” said Bert, as they headed for the door.
42.
At five a.m. West Coast time, Jacqueline Mayfield was already wide awake. Drinking coffee, padding around her apartment in very large and very fuzzy slippers, she was bracing herself to make a phone call she’d been dreading. She sat down on a sofa, propped her feet on an ottoman, and speed-dialed Candace McBride to tell her that her morning interview with TV Insider had been cancelled.
Until she’d heard the word, Candace, still in bed, had been groggy from last night’s booze and Xanax. Suddenly she wasn’t. “Cancelled? What do you mean, cancelled?”
“They changed their minds. They don’t want the segment.”
“Changed their minds? They begged for this interview. They promised us the lead slot, asked for clips from the show …”
Gently but not quite apologetically, Jacqueline said, “What can I tell you? They wanted it. Now they don’t. I can’t see inside their heads.”
The diva went silent for a moment. Even alone in her hotel bed she was acting. Her face ran through a number of expressions, from surprise to anger to resignation to a sort of droll rising above. “All right, all right,” she said. “Guess I’ll have to save the charm for the Red Carpet spot this evening.”
The publicist swallowed some coffee. “Actually you won’t. That one’s off too.”
“What?”
“It’s off. The whole week’s schedule is off. Sorry, but that’s how it is.”
Candace sat bolt upright in bed and swung her feet onto the floor. The quick movement made her head pound. She squinted past her drawn blinds and could just make out the silhouette of the security guard at her door. “How it is?” she hissed. “Jacqueline, what the fuck are you telling me?”
The big woman put her coffee down and indulged in an inaudible sigh. Like any good publicist she could bullshit with the best of them, but the easy flow of fibs and euphemisms and strategic exaggerations depended to a fair degree on a genuine enthusiasm for the message. The enthusiasm was in itself a kind of truth, if not the purest sort; but without it the stretches and evasions felt thick and dirty in her mouth and she just couldn’t sell them. “Honey, listen, you’re a lot more famous than you were a week ago. You’ve had the kind of exposure actors dream of. Enjoy that.”
The star was up and pacing now. “Enjoy it? Enjoy it … like, it’s over?”
The publicist said nothing.
“Why’s it over, Jacqueline? Why’s it suddenly over? Everyone cancels on the same day? That makes no sense to me. I don’t believe it. They didn’t cancel. You cancelled. Didn’t you?”
“Candace —”
Crouching low, tugging at her hair, the actress said, “Just tell me the fucking truth. You cancelled my appearances, didn’t you?”
Softly, evenly, Jacqueline said, “Yes. I did.”
“You fucking bitch.”
“It’s a brutal business, Candace. The way decisions get made, it isn’t always —”
“You fucking bitch,” the diva said again, and broke off the connection.
Jacqueline Mayfield stared at her silent phone for just a moment, then finished her coffee and padded off to the shower to get ready for the rest of her day’s work.
---
Jake was dreaming of bacon.
Gradually he realized that he wasn’t dreaming, that someone was cooking breakfast on the communal gas grill right in front of his cottage. He got out of bed and peeked through a gap in the shutters to see Ace cracking eggs into a skillet. The eggs looked tiny in his enormous hands but he cracked them with finesse and tenderness, as if he hoped to put the shells together again after he had drained them.
Jake threw some water on his face and joined him on the patio. Ace asked him if he wanted some food. He waved the offer away. “Too early for me. How’d it go last night?”
Checking the doneness of the bacon with a pair of tongs, Ace said, “Went good. The crazy sister, I know the name of her boat. I know where she keeps it. Couldn’t find it though.”
“You went looking?”
“Me and Bert, we got back to town, it was pretty early yet, we figured we’d check out the marina. But it’s gated on the land side. Couldn’t see much. Couldn’t get onto the docks. Need to scope it out in daylight. From the water side.”
Jake nodded but he was still a little drowsy, a little fuzzy from the Vermentino and the grappa, and the nod referred to nothing in particular.
With a feathery touch Ace flipped a couple eggs, keeping the yolks perfectly intact. His eyes still on the skillet, he said, “Bert says Joey has a boat, a little fishing skiff. We’ll take a cruise around a little later.”
The we was vague and Jake wasn’t quite sure if it meant he was invited. But he knew he didn’t want to be left behind again. He said, “I want to go along.”
Ace seemed surprised by the remark. “Of course you’re going along. You’re the one that’s gotta tell us if that’s the boat that almost killed Donna.”
---
Quentin Dole had worked through the night, had worked with a relentless energy that banished fatigue and obliterated the usual sense of the passage of time. He was by nature a spasmodic writer, someone who might stare into space for twenty minutes then put his head down over the keyboard and type non-stop for an hour. But with this script the rhythm was very different. The words flowed forth not in bursts but with a not quite human steadiness. There was something automatic, inexorable in the way that speech followed speech and scene followed scene. It was almost as if Dole was not creating the script but hearing it, not inventing but taking down dictation. When he’d finished the episode and held the printed pages in his hand, he didn’t quite remember having written them. But he knew they were right; he knew they told the story of what had to happen next in the universe of Adrift.
He slept for a fitful hour before booking a flight to Miami. Then he called his newly found and newly solicitous father and asked or rather commanded him to meet him at the airport.
43.
Joey Goldman’s boat wasn’t much to look at, just eighteen feet of bland and slightly dinged up fiberglass, some sun-faded blue seat cushions, and a well-worn outboard engine that usually but not always took him where he wanted to go. He kept the modest craft at Garrison Bight, the locals’ marina, where teak was seldom oiled, brass was rarely buffed, and every once in a while a venerable houseboat or trawler would silently settle to the bottom of its slip, coming to rest at a picturesque angle in the fragrant mud.
Now Joey and his passengers pulled slowly away from the funky dock, and when they’d scudded under the Fleming Key bridge and through the upper harbor to round the breakwater that led to the privileged precinct of the Brigantine Marina, they looked like poor relations arriving for a strained, unwelcome visit, or maybe more like refugees pulling into some barely believable promised land. The tall raked masts of million dollar sloops and ketches towered over them. They were dwarfed by the gleaming tuna towers and pendant outriggers of rich men’s occasional fishing boats.
Donna, her arm still in a sling but her color and sass largely restored, said, “No offense, Joey, but people’ll think we’re someone’s dinghy.”
“Let ’em think what they want,” said Bert, who was dressed in red and white seersucker for the excursion. His dog had a tiny yellow life vest on. “Snob bastards.”
At idle speed, Joey weaved through the mooring field and up and down the ranks of floating piers. Here and there, amid the sailboats and the cabin cruisers, speedboats were roped into their berths. There was something odd and rather sad about these speedboats: In their overreaching attempts to be distinctive they all ended up, like society women in extravagant hats, looking more or less the same. Lots of chrome. Swollen phallic hulls. Rich and sinister finishes leavened with flecks and sparkles. Looking at these flashy vessels, Jake begged his eyes to discern details, telltale quirks, but he felt a secret fear of failure. He doubted he could tell on
e speedboat from another.
Then they found the Quickie. It was tied up between a big wooden yawl and a high-tech racing sloop. The name was painted in fancy gold script on a tapering transom. The pipes and windshield glared blindingly in the late morning sun. The dock lines were slack and the muscular hull sat perfectly still in the sheltered water. Joey eased to within five feet of its stern.
Ace said to Jake, “Zat it?”
Jake stared, thought, hoped that memory might trump imagination as he tried to picture truly what had happened on the morning of Donna’s big swim. He saw again the speedboat appearing with horrible abruptness in the channel between the islets; he recalled the looming menace of the lifted hull; he remembered watching distance shrink between the boat and its victim then stretch again as the guilty craft sped remorselessly away. He stared at the Quickie for a few long moments, pursed his lips, then just shook his head.
“That isn’t it?” said Ace.
Unhappily, Jake said, “I don’t know. It might be. I’m just not sure.”
Ace looked at Bert. Bert looked at Donna. Donna said, “Don’t ask me, I was underneath the sonofabitch.”
Joey idled for another moment. He was just clicking into reverse when a tall blonde woman in amber sunglasses appeared at the head of the dock, just outside the fence, perhaps a hundred feet away. She wore a chic leather jacket that was far too snug to close, but left a swath of cleavage and taut flat midriff exposed to the air and sunshine. On her feet were golden sandals whose straps wound up her calves.
She was punching in a gate code when she noticed the crummy little skiff that was loitering near her boat. She stopped what she was doing, watched, appraised. Sightseers? Gawkers? It took a moment before anyone in Joey’s craft saw the woman standing there, and then everyone seemed to discover her at once. Heads turned, gazes locked in. The woman didn’t budge, didn’t flinch, didn’t look away. As the seconds passed, her immobility seemed more and more a dare, a taunt.
Never taking his eyes off the blonde, Ace said in a rough whisper, “Put me ashore.”
With one jerk of the motor Joey maneuvered toward the pier and the big man leaped onto it. Jake, by reflex, followed him, and the two of them, first jogging then sprinting, dodging coiled ropes and stacks of gear, labored up the floating dock that rocked and tilted under the pounding of their feet. For an instant more the blonde just looked at them, then she wheeled and moved away. She didn’t panic, didn’t run, just walked quickly with a confident and mocking step, a bag slung across her shoulder and bouncing on her hip.
At the head of the pier, Ace swung open the security gate and lumbered through it, Jake closely following. But as soon as the water and the boats were behind them, they found themselves without transition in a teeming bazaar of shops and kiosks, cafes and bars. Chairs and tables spilled across the sidewalk, almost to the shoreline; early drinkers sucked tall Bloody Marys through straws. Phalanxes of shoppers glutted up the passageways, lugging souvenirs, taking pictures. Ace and Jake peered left and right, ran a block in one direction, then, winded and sweating, doubled back the other way, sidling and dodging as they went. But there was no trace of the taunting blonde. Somehow, even with her unmistakable strangeness, she had melted into the milling crowd. She was as gone as though she’d never been there.
44.
As usual, it was Claire who was expected to bear the brunt of Candace’s unhappiness, this time brought about by the cancelling of her publicity appearances. During a break in that day’s shooting, the diva came barging into her metal box of an office and said without prelude, “You’ve heard what that bitch Jacqueline did to me?”
Claire was elbow deep in mundane paperwork — union time cards, caterer’s bills. Without looking up she said, “Yes, I’ve heard.”
Redundantly, hoping to draw the other woman’s gaze, Candace said, “Cancelled my interviews. Every one.”
Claire kept working, her eyes down on her papers. “Yes, I’ve heard,” she said again. She said it very calmly and without much apparent interest or sympathy. This confused and rattled Candace. Why wasn’t Claire responding as she should, as she always had before? Why wasn’t she swept at once into the drama?
Upping the ante, the actress put a hand on her hip and dipped her shoulders forward. With her free hand she loudly snapped a finger. “Just like that,” she said. “No warning. No explanation. No gratitude for everything I’ve done.”
Claire briefly put her pen down. “Gratitude? How about gratitude on your side?” She went back to the tasks in front of her.
“On my side?” said the diva, her voice rising in disbelief. “For what? Being kept up all hours of the day and night? Getting stung? Getting poisoned?”
“You weren’t poisoned. It was chocolate. Look, you didn’t have to go along with the publicity. You did it because you wanted the attention. You got it, and all you did was complain. Now you’re losing it and you’re complaining again. Which is it, Candace? Make up your mind.”
The actress stared back at Claire for just a heartbeat, then she turned and strode the short length of the metal office, her forearm raised across her brow. Peering back over her shoulder she whimpered, “So you’re against me too.”
Wearily, softly, Claire said, “I’m not against you. And by the way, neither’s Jacqueline. But speaking for myself, I’m sick and tired of babysitting you. You’re a real pain in the ass, Candace.”
The words could not have been much simpler but it seemed to take a while for the actress to process them. Behind her eyes she was riffling through her repertoire of possible reactions. Righteous outrage? Wounded feelings? Treating the comment as a bit of a joke? But nothing in her well-schooled range seemed to fit the naked truth of the moment and she stood there blankly, wondering what she ought to feel.
Instead it was Claire who finally let the emotions fly. Months of forbearance, of overwork, of acting on decisions she did not believe in and taking care of everyone except herself finally overwhelmed her tact, and she allowed herself the luxury of candor. “You’re more trouble than the rest of the cast put together. You’re selfish. You’re oblivious. You’re cruel to less important people. You’re talented but you’re a nightmare, Candace. Now if you’d please leave, I have work to do.”
---
Claire’s heart rate had returned to normal and she was unconsciously whistling when her cell phone rang. It was Jake.
“Know why I’m calling?” he asked.
“No idea.”
“I’m calling because you say I never call and that I’m never the one to see if we can get together. So I’m calling not to be a chicken and to ask if I can see you later.”
Claire was pleased enough that her peachy skin flushed beneath the suntan. “Well,” she said. “You’re the second person who’s surprised me today.”
“Who was the first?”
“Myself. I just told off Candace.”
“Good for you.”
“Maybe. Felt good in the moment. But, you know, it’s partly your fault.”
“My fault?”
“These last few days,” she said, “hanging around with you, talking, I’ve finally been thinking about what I want for a change.”
Jake said, “So that means we can get together?”
“Sorry, but actually we can’t. Not today. Quentin’s coming into town.”
Impressed, Jake said, “Wow, he finished his script already? That’s some fast writing.”
“He got on a roll and worked through the night. Didn’t even talk with the staff writers. Just powered through it. Sounded really wired when he called. Said he was catching an early flight.”
“So he’s in Florida already?”
Claire looked at her watch. “No, it’ll be another hour or two. You know, with the time difference. But I’ve got a bunch of grunt work to do in the meantime. Can we get together maybe tomorrow?”
“Sure,” Jake said. “Sure.”
There was one of those dangling pauses that happen when a
conversation is basically over but two people aren’t quite ready to break off the tenuous intimacy of a phone call. Finally Claire said, “I gotta go. I’m really glad you called.”
She tried to get back to her paperwork but had a little trouble concentrating. Two minutes later her cell phone rang again.
Before he even said hello, Jake said rather breathlessly, “The time difference.”
He was calling from his cottage, which suddenly seemed too small to contain the excited circuits of his pacing. Leaning far forward, flapping his free hand in some emphatic yet vague explanatory gesture, he said again, “You said the time difference. It didn’t register before.”
Claire said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Knowing he was rambling, but too amped up to fix it, he said, “I just thought of this. Quentin’s early morning flight. Early morning in California. Not here. Three hours later here. So by the time he gets to Florida it’s late afternoon.”
Patiently, Claire said, “Yes, the earth revolves. That’s how time zones work.”
Cutting in again, Jake said, “Three hours later for the time change. Four, five hours for the flight.”
“Right. So Quentin will be in Miami around four. I don’t see--”
“Except I’m not talking about Quentin now.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m talking about Jacqueline. Jacqueline got here too soon.”
Claire said, “Jake, I’m not really following this. Can you please slow down a little?”
He tried to. He plopped down on the sofa in his living room and pegged his elbows on his bony knees. “Okay. Okay. The day Donna got run over. She got hurt … when? Around ten. When did Jacqueline land in Miami? Around two, right? Isn’t that when it was? Two p.m. East Coast time. Do the math. There weren’t enough hours. She would’ve had to get the news, get to the airport. It should have been more like two o’clock Los Angeles time when she landed. More like five out here.”
“So you’re saying —”
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