Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

by Donna Andrews

  Jay (VO)

  During the Gulf War, I was among a handful of reporters who slipped away from their handlers and went out hunting the real story. I never learned the name of that village, which, officially, never existed.

  Quick scenes: Jay flagging down an American patrol; overnighting his film to Reuters; buttonholing various brass and getting the brushoff. When his pix haven’t hit the wire in forty-eight hours, Jay calls his editor and learns the film never arrived. “This one,” the normally fearless editor whispers, “this one we have to let go.”

  So Camera Guy quits. Snippets of Jay slugging booze in Kuwait City, burning his press credentials, pitching his camera off a hotel balcony.

  Jesus, this is good...

  Damn, the phone again. Ignore it. No, it might be Sal. I marched out and snatched the receiver. “Yeah?”

  Dead air, not even a dial tone this time.

  Cursing, I went to peek out the front door. No black sedans, just a Pac Bell truck across the street. That made sense. Trouble on the line, so they were here to fix it. If anyone was screwing with my phone, they wouldn’t advertise it so blatantly.

  Unless they — they didn’t exist, of course, this was Jay’s POV — wanted me to know I was under the microscope. Turn up the heat and perhaps I’d bolt, leading them to whatever they feared Jay had handed off to me before they snatched him.

  Good script element, but of course I knew nothing, had done nothing wrong. But then neither had the Iraqis in that village.

  I worked till dusk, then swilled enough hooch to nod off in the living room as Warren Zevon howled from my ancient turntable about lawyers, guns, and money.

  The week passed in a blur, most waking hours spent polishing the synopsis and blasting through a first draft of the script. Jay’s note-under-the-door pen pal is revealed as ex-spook Sophia Summers — hot but mature, a Michelle Pfeiffer or Sigourney Weaver — who’d been in Iraq in ‘91 and was likewise haunted by the dead village that didn’t exist.

  They join forces on a frantic cross-country odyssey for evidence, falling for each other while remaining one step ahead of the baddies.

  When I finished the day’s writing, I’d hit the bottle and let my subconscious take over, jotting paranoid notes and bloody parables as they popped into my head, straining to reach further in my pursuit of Jay.

  My work was interrupted by sudden, at-any-hour racket from the new tenant downstairs: power tools whining, inane sitcoms blaring, weird squeals of electronic feedback.

  Other strange happenings: All my houseplants wilted one night, perhaps shriveled by the ear-piercing feedback. The phantom phone calls continued sporadically, until I finally unplugged the phone.

  Then last night, returning from a booze run, I sensed that something was off as soon as I walked in. Nothing was missing, nothing out of place, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had been in the apartment.

  Well, screw ’em, so long as they didn’t impede the work.

  Sal loved the synopsis and, true to his word, had three pitches scheduled for next week, so I’d drive up to L.A. on Monday.

  Knowing Camera Guy was the best thing I’d ever done kept me content. Drinking like a fish, hardly eating, worried that I’d either been infected by Jay’s madness or really was under surveillance, but content nonetheless. Finishing the script would exorcise both Jay’s ghost and my three years of Hollywood exile.

  Such was my upbeat mood this bright Saturday morning. I had finished the script last night. My Jay Max was real, his story compelling, and while it lacked some still-elusive something that would lift it from cash-register-jingling commerce to lasting art, I knew the missing ingredient would come.

  Neither Jay nor I would settle for less.

  I’d continued researching the Marshalls, a clan that required toning down to make them believable as fiction. Jay’s dad remained a rake at 78, golfing with ex-Presidents and shagging socialites half his age. He’d been such a good spook that no records of his CIA service had ever emerged from the vaults at Langley.

  Two interesting items were documented: Jay’s dad paid Bill Casey a hospital visit the day before the CIA director died during the Iran-Contra scandal, and Regis Marshall had been in Dallas “visiting friends” on November 22, 1963.

  Before her recent death, Jay’s mom had turned a blind eye to her husband’s philandering by turning to drink, charity, and Catholic mysticism. Jay’s siblings headed foundations and edited literary magazines, prayed with Billy Graham and partied in Monte Carlo, opined on cable news shows and got away with murder in Tijuana whorehouses.

  Only Jay had lived off-screen, largely invisible, leaving me to invent him by draping his shroud around my muse. My Camera Guy was a Quixote in khaki shorts, roughed up by life, but still expecting truth to triumph.

  The rapid-fire plot worked fine, but crafting a good thriller wasn’t enough; I had to seamlessly weave Jay’s personal odyssey into the larger tale. So get your ass back to work, Tim.

  No sooner had I settled at my desk when the phone rang. The phone I’d unplugged days ago... My heart skipped, but then I remembered that Wednesday night, well into my cups, I’d decided to plug the phone back in. That I only vaguely recalled doing so was a testament to how hard I’d been boozing.

  “This is Tim.”

  “Your mother died last night,” said a soft female voice, then hung up.

  Dropping the receiver, I stared numbly out the living-room window. Mom was only seventy, losing her marbles, sure, but healthy as an ox. I was planning to bring her to Cali soon, get her around-the-clock care...

  Cold cig pasted between my lips, I grabbed the phone and dialed my big sister Ellen, back in Ohio.

  “...number has been disconnected.”

  Impossible. Ellen was the responsible one. She’d lived in the same house for twenty years and paid her bills two months in advance. Three more dials got the same result, so I tried Aunt Sophie.

  “...disconnected.”

  Working through my phone book, I grew frantic as every call failed to ring through.

  “Tim Stokley no longer exists,” a voice whispered in my ear. “Maybe when you erased him, your family was erased as well.”

  “Shut up!” I barked, recognizing the voice as Jay’s. “And I talked to Ellen at Christmas, so she definitely does exist, unlike you. You’re dead, remember?”

  “I was. You resurrected me.”

  Our imaginary exchange was interrupted by music erupting from downstairs. The new neighbor again, blaring thrash-metal at ear-bleeding volume.

  “Okay, that’s enough!” Storming out of the apartment and down the stairs, I was ready to tear Noisy Neighbor a new one, but as I barged through the door into the first-floor’s common kitchen, the music stopped.

  “Play your tunes that loud again,” I shouted, marching back to the last studio unit, “and I call the landlord, understand?”

  Silence.

  “You hear me?”

  Nothing. I rapped on the door, which hadn’t been shut completely and now snicked open. “Listen,” I called through the crack, “other people live here.”

  Still nothing, so I nudged the door open. The apartment was empty. I went in and looked around. Nail holes in the walls had been patched, but not repainted. Turning the faucet in the tiny bathroom produced only a belch of air. The room was vacant, but damn it, the noise had come from here, directly below my bedroom.

  “Forget it, Tim,” Camera Guy said. “They’re just screwing with you.”

  Wrong. I’d been screwing with myself, dancing out on a tightrope because the script demanded it. But unlike Jay, I had a grip on reality and could return to solid earth whenever I chose.

  Camera Guy’s ghost had yielded its secrets. Time for Jay to get along to his final reward, and for me to get up the I-5 to Hollywood and reclaim my career.

  This notion calmed me, but when I turned to leave I saw a poster tacked to the inside of the door. WANTED FOR TREASON shouted a six-inch headline, but t
he figure in the poster below had been cut out. I gawked at it for a moment, then raced through the kitchen and out the door.

  A flash of yellow caught my eye, dangling from the hedge. I walked over to where Jay had stood a week ago today and saw that it was a strip of police tape. It was a sunny afternoon, but suddenly I was shivering, pulse hammering like a meth freak’s.

  “You can flirt with madness,” I reminded myself in a whisper, “as long as you keep sight of the difference between truth and fiction. And the truth is that Mom isn’t dead and nobody’s after me.”

  I’d wound myself up like a spring. It was time to split for L.A., but not just yet.

  Crouching down, I poked around the roots of the hedge until my fingers brushed cool plastic. Three film canisters that Jay had stashed there before I shooed him into the arms of the law.

  As I gingerly extracted the film cans, leery of their toxic truth, a car alarm began blaring up at the motel. Jumping to my feet, I sensed a target on my back, but there were no black sedans in sight.

  Not yet.

  I stashed the film in the Mustang’s trunk, then raced upstairs to the apartment. Shut down the computer, grabbed a suitcase and threw in clothes, smokes, toiletries. The script and all my notes went into a leather shoulder bag, then this first load was deposited in the Mustang’s backseat.

  The car alarm was still screaming as I returned for the computer and a final look around. I stalked from room to room, fretting over forgetting something important, then the idea hit me.

  Dino, my beat-poetry-loving drinking buddy, was the assistant manager at a Fast-Foto in Mission Valley. A finger-walk through the Yellow Pages and — thankfully — this call rang through.

  Dino promised to have the film developed in fifty-nine minutes or less, per the Fast-Foto pledge. I made him swear not to wander out to toke up, then dropped the phone and split.

  The freeway was less than a hundred yards from my door. I’d be at Fast-Foto within minutes, drop the film, then call Sal and let him know I was on the way.

  Damn it! The on-ramp was blocked off for the goddamned San Diego marathon. No choice but to continue on toward Sea World, away from my destination. The next ramp was also closed and, caught in weekend tourist traffic, it took fifteen minutes just to reverse course and head back toward Sports Arena. Frantic now, like a rat in a maze, I needed to get off the road, get a grip, and plot an alternate route to Mission Valley.

  One of my watering holes was dead ahead. Wheeling into Hoby’s Hideaway, I grabbed my bag and darted inside. Ordered and downed a whiskey, then took out the script, flipped toward the end, and read:

  EXT: A freight train speeding across the plains beneath an inky, ominous sky.

  INT: Jay huddled in a boxcar, arms around the sleeping Sophia.

  Jay (VO)

  The train carries us east, toward a safe-deposit box in Boston, the key to which hangs around my neck on a knotted shoelace, eighteen inches of cotton that I used to strangle a man last night. A man I thought was my friend...

  “ ’Nother shot?”

  “No,” I told the barkeep, tucking the script away. No time to ride the rails with Jay when I needed to get moving myself. Fishing for cash, I heard a voice say, “Scotch. The oldest you’ve got.”

  It was Crewcut, the guy who’d shadowed me at Ocean Beach the other night. My stomach clenched with fear, and I knew how Jay must have felt when the cops squealed up beside him.

  Then I thought of my Camera Guy, roaring east in a boxcar with Sophia. Maybe they didn’t have a chance, but by God they were going to go down fighting. Resolving to do the same, I eased off the stool and made for the Men’s. Once out of Crewcut’s sight, I raced down the hall and burst through the fire exit. With the alarm wailing, I sprinted around the building, leapt into the Mustang, and squealed away just as Crewcut ran out of the bar.

  Evasive maneuvers for a dozen blocks, with no sign of a tail. Confident that I’d given him the slip, I detoured around the marathon and finally reached the freeway. Just as I was merging into traffic, a minivan swerved into my lane. Mashing the brakes, I cranked the wheel hard right, and skidded across the shoulder to slam into the guardrail. The impact whipped me forward but, belted in, I was okay except for feeling like I’d been belted by Mike Tyson.

  Turbo-charged by adrenaline, I leapt out of the car and saw that the Mustang had blown a tire and wasn’t going anywhere. I shouldered my bag, retrieved the film from the trunk, then vaulted the guardrail and scrambled up the embankment to the access road.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was in Old Town, hiking back toward my neighborhood with no real destination, just knowing that I had to keep moving. Scared and shaking as the adrenaline drained away, I also felt oddly alive, an underdog hero drawing strength from the script slung over my shoulder. Camera Guy was my Excalibur, the One Ring, and if I could elude the dragnet, I might yet triumph in the final reel.

  Out of smokes and figuring I’d need cash, I found a mini-mall ATM, but was so frazzled that I punched in my PIN wrong twice in a row and the damned machine swallowed my card just as a black sedan with opaque windows emerged from the Burger King drive-thru.

  I scurried around a grease monkey and waited behind a dumpster until I was convinced I hadn’t been spotted. They were closing in now, so I stuck to alleys, desperate to avoid the black sedans that now patrolled every street. Moving in the general direction of my apartment, I no longer felt like a hero destined for happy endings. More like a hunted animal, defenseless, barely able to flash a fang.

  Seeking refuge, I scaled the chain-link fence around an auto junkyard. I rooted through glove boxes and found half a pack of ancient Chesterfields. Rationing each precious puff, I settled in the bed of a mangled pickup and considered my options.

  Once it was dark, I’d make for the post office up on Midway, where a machine processed mail 24/7. Top priority was getting Camera Guy on the way to Sal, then I’d worry about making my escape. Nothing heroic about that, just a calculated shot at posterity. A hundred years from now, people will still be watching Citizen Kane and The Godfather. It was ego unbound, sure, but Camera Guy aspired to such august company. As for Tim Wolfe? I’d either gone completely bugshit, or was about to be swallowed up by something I couldn’t begin to understand.

  “Or maybe,” Jay Max whispered in my ear, “it’s both.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed, then fished out the recorder to dictate script notes, editing and casting ideas, stuff the suits always ignore. No matter. The script was the real deal, and it made me proud.

  I waited until dusk, then scrabbled back over the fence and started toward the post office. The trek took well over an hour as I moved cautiously, darting from shadow to shadow. They might get me eventually but not, I vowed, before Camera Guy was on its way to Sal.

  The post office was deserted when I arrived. Hurry, Timmy, hurry! I scribbled Sal’s address on a Priority Mail envelope, tucked everything inside, and prayed the machine would take my Visa.

  It seemed an eternity, waiting for that stamp to spit out, but then it was in my hands, affixed to the envelope and deposited in the box. Camera Guy was now secure in the labyrinthine bowels of the United States Postal Service.

  Sighing with relief, I started down the long, dim corridor, eyeing each indented cubby of P.O. boxes for lurking assassins. Halfway to the exit, something taped up in one of the nooks caught my attention. It was a wanted poster, just as Jay had claimed, picturing one Harold Hawkins, a redneck abortion bomber. The next poster wasn’t relegated to the shadows, but was prominently displayed on the inside of the plate-glass exit door.

  The fugitive was me.

  Not lingering to read the charges, I fled into the night, gnashing my teeth to keep from screaming.

  “Now do you believe me?” Jay asked.

  I didn’t answer, saving every breath for my flight down Midway, away from that foul, false indictment. Ten huffing-puffing minutes later, I stumbled into a bus stop and dropped on the bench, sweaty and sucking a
ir.

  “You can’t run fast enough,” Jay said. “Or far enough.”

  I clutched my aching sides. I knew he was right — knew a black sedan would squeal up to the curb any second and it would all be over. Then a question struck me like a thunderbolt.

  Why aren’t they here already?

  No comeback from Jay, so I got up and staggered on, trying to puzzle this out. The bad guys had always been one step ahead, taunting me all week, forcing me off the road en route to Fast-Foto, slapping up that wanted poster they knew I’d see.

  Why all the cat and mouse, when they could have scooped me up whenever they wanted? Maybe the fact that I was still at large meant that they didn’t want me at all. With Jay eliminated, maybe all they wanted was his film. Give it to them, I reasoned, and just maybe they’d leave me alone.

  Infused with new energy by this stay-of-execution hope, I marched right down the sidewalk, no longer cowering at the sound of every car. Reaching my apartment unmolested, I hesitated briefly, then crossed myself and went inside.

  No cargo net dropped from the ceiling, but I wasn’t anxious to linger and quickly scribbled a note explaining that I’d found the film cans just hours ago.

  I’ve no idea what’s on the film, no desire to know. In fact, there never was any film. No oddball with a camera at my door...

  I put the note on the living-room floor, under the film cans, then I was out the door and away. But to where, with no wheels and forty bucks in my pocket?

  I’d have to go Greyhound. Take the bus, and leave the fleeing to them. The station was downtown, a good five miles distant. Hitching was out; I wasn’t going anywhere near a freeway on foot, so I steeled myself for the long march.

  Three hours to reach the station. A skinny young nurse passed me on the sidewalk, snapping her cell phone shut. I turned and eyed her, knowing that if I could just reach Sal, he’d help arrange transportation or wire me some cash.