The man shut off the engine and got out.
Pellam’s hand casually went to the zipper of his jacket.
The intruder was huge. He slammed the door with a loud bang. He kept staring at Pellam. Then he started across the street. He had a crew cut and folds of skin hung over his eyes.
Pellam unzipped his jacket and stood by the roadside. His hand rested on his belt and he rubbed the buckle. With an index finger he touched the wood grip of the gun.
When the man reached the shoulder of the road, twenty feet away, he stopped. Looking straight into Pellam’s eyes, he said, “You need any young men?”
Pellam squinted and cocked his head.
The man repeated, “Young men?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Look,” the man said stiffly, “I know you hear that a lot of folk aren’t happy to have you all in town because you’re saying things about Maddox in your movie that aren’t so nice. Well, you won’t hear that from me. I don’t feel that way at all.”
“Uh-huh, good.”
“Now,” the man continued his recitation, “my boy Larry’s seventeen and was most recent in a play. I mean a serious play without music. I Remember Mama. He was good—I’d say that even he wasn’t my son—but he’d be top-notch in a movie where you get to say your lines over and over again and they take the best one. I mean top-notch.”
“Well, sir, I don’t do any casting.”
“He’ll do it real reasonable. You know, just to get his foot in the door, so to speak. Could do manual labor, too, till an acting part comes ’round. He’s strapping.”
Pellam shook his head.
“He’s taking classes.”
“Sorry.” Pellam zipped up his jacket. “I wish I could help out but I can’t.”
The man stood, shoulders drooping and face bright red. Behind him was a decrepit house that at one time was a marvel of Victorian excess. It had been abandoned halfway through a futile make-over. He said in a stiff voice, “I’ve been out of work three years now. Was a deckhand for a inland tow company. I’m about at the end of my rope.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want sympathy. I’d work if there was any work but there ain’t. Larry’s ’bout the only chance we’ve got for some income.”
Pellam shook his head. “Wish it were different.”
“Sure.” The man stood for a moment longer. “Thanks for your time.” He turned silently and walked back to his car. He looked at the camper, then started the engine. Pellam watched the car roll away, followed by the bubbling sound of a rust-shot muffler.
He trudged back to the camper, disarmed himself and hung up his jacket. He returned to the kitchenette.
A half hour later he was sitting at the tiny table, flipping through his Maddox location file, which was filled with Polaroid snapshots. As Tony Sloan had requested, he’d taken a number of shots of empty houses—nearly every other house in certain parts of town—and he had narrowed the bungalow search down to four: two of them cute and two run-down. He was checking the addresses against a tattered map of Maddox.
That was when he heard the hesitant footsteps on the gravel walk. Pellam’s hands froze on the report.
Had Larry’s dad returned for another audition?
Pellam stood and walked to the rear of the camper, peering out. No, it was a different car. A dark red sedan.
The sort the Italian and the WASP detectives would drive.
It turned out not to be the two cops, however. Without knocking, a dark-complected man in his mid-thirties stepped inside and looked around, orienting himself. He wore a trim, double-breasted charcoal gray suit and reflective blue sunglasses.
He said, “I know what you’re hoping for but give it up. You’re not getting out of here.” The door swung shut and he slowly pulled his sunglasses off and slipped them into his breast pocket.
Chapter 6
PELLAM PURSED HIS lips together. He shook his head.
“What?” the intruder asked.
“It’s ‘I know what you’re thinking. But it’s too late. You’re not getting out of here.’ ”
“No.” The man frowned. “I’m sure.” He propped a briefcase on the driver’s seat and opened it.
“Anyway, I’ve decided to cut the dialogue. Do it in visuals. Want coffee? It’s instant.”
A script appeared from the briefcase and the man began thumbing through it. “Aw, no. Pellam. Don’t cut it. It’s a great line. ‘But give it up.’ It’s very—what’s the word?—anachronistic. Oh, you’re right.” He read the script carefully. “The line’s gone.”
“Take a pew,” Pellam said and put the kettle on the flame.
Marty Weller easily settled his lanky frame into the dining banquette. A yoga practitioner, he possessed the sort of physique that could comfortably handle a camper environment. He had an airbrushed tan and muscles in places where only a Nautilus machine could put them. Where his trimmed eyebrows ended above his nose there appeared California creases—two short, vertical furrows, the result of a lifetime of squinting. “Tea. Herbal.” He tapped the script. “I must have been thinking of the first draft. Or the second. Or one of them. You rewrite a hell of a lot, John.”
“Lipton?”
Weller looked about, as if he might spot a box of Celestial Seasonings chamomile hidden nearby. “Okay,” he said with reservation. Then: “Honey?”
“Domino.”
“Well, this is middle America.” Weller smiled slyly and asked, “So?”
“Yes?”
“You know what I’m asking. What’s the scoop? On Sloan.”
Independent producer Marty Weller was as much a gossip sponge as anyone in Hollywood—though he was not sufficiently powerful to use much of the gossip he absorbed. He had done a string of offbeat films that were lukewarm hits. This opened doors for him but did not automatically get his pictures made. Still, gossip about Tony Sloan, while not particularly useful to Weller, was platinum gossip. One wanted it the same way one wanted Taittinger or beluga.
Yet Weller’s presence here in small-town Missouri now reminded Pellam of L.A. protocol and, cognizant of his obscenely large fee, he recalled the rule: Assume anything you say, even in strictest confidence, will immediately be transmitted to the Hollywood Reporter and attributed to you. Pellam gave Weller a diluted version of the film’s production woes.
“Word is he’s cindering in the upper atmosphere,” Weller said with a frown that did nothing to mask his delight.
Pellam shrugged. “Okay, Marty, don’t keep me in suspense. Go or no go?”
Weller picked up the battered black-covered script he had just misquoted. The title was Central Standard Time. “We’re close, John. Damn close. I’ve got maybe eighty percent of the financing in place.” He fell silent for a minute and riffled the pages. In his former life—which in Hollywood meant only a few years ago—Pellam had both written and directed independent films. Central Standard Time had been the film he’d been working on when his career had been derailed in a big way.
No one had been interested in the property until immaculately tanned Marty Weller had appeared on Pellam’s doorstep and told him, with as much sincerity as a Hollywood producer could muster, that he was going to get Pellam’s “vision” turned into a dark art-house classic.
Finally, he said delicately, “There were some questions about what happened before.” He looked up uncomfortably. “You were actually in production?”
“We were two weeks into principal photography.”
Weller did not look up but intently read what happened to be the blank back cover of the script. “When he got sick, you mean.”
Got sick. Pellam said, “That’s right.”
Tommy Bernstein—the leading man in Central Standard and Pellam’s best friend—had not “gotten sick” at all but had died of a cocaine-induced heart attack during principal photography, which had brought the production to a halt and Pellam’s life as he’d lived it to a shattering conclusion.
Weller was flipping through the script and sending a stale breeze up into the air. “Somebody . . . I’m just explaining why it’s taking so long. This is bullshit, I know. But somebody talked about a jinx.”
Pellam laughed. “Like the Exorcist stories, that old crap?”
“People are more superstitious about money than about their lives. More producers fly on Friday the thirteenth than write checks, you better believe it.”
“Well, nothing I can do about that.”
“And you directing, that’s still carved in stone?”
Pellam noted that the cautious tone in the man’s voice was not going away. He said firmly, “Yep.”
“The thing is, John . . . Well, you’ve been out of the loop for a long time.”
“I direct or they don’t get property. It’s a deal-breaker.”
“And they’re saying if they don’t get to pick the director, leads, and DP, we don’t get the money. They’ll—”
“Mexican standoff.”
“They’ll let you coproduce. I think they’ll even go gross points since you wrote it.”
“Producing means nothing to me—”
“It means a shitload of money is what it means. Look, John, the budget is seven million.” He tapped the script. “It’s got ‘film noir cult classic’ written all over it. We’re going to shoot in black and white, for God’s sake. This is going to make money. It cannot not make money—”
“Marty,” Pellam said patiently.
Weller’s momentarily wide eyes shrank to a more sober size. “Forgive me, I know not who I bullshit. Okay, think about this alternative: Can you get up two hundred, two twenty?”
“What if I can?”
“We cut back to four million, finance it ourselves, shoot with unknowns, and pucker up at the sight of every distributor’s backside. You can direct.”
Pellam realized the teakettle was filling the small kitchen with steam. He made himself coffee and Weller a cup of tea, while he was mentally adding a second mortgage on his house, selling his old Porsche and adding in the fee for Missouri River Blues.
“One twenty, one fifty, maybe I can do.”
Weller performed his own calculations. “I’d have to make some phone calls but I think if you come in with that, we can get it done. For that, you can direct but you don’t get points. You’d work for scale and maybe have to kick some back.”
“I want this film made. I’ve never wanted to get rich.”
“You always were a crazy sonofabitch, Pellam.” Weller sipped the hot tea, holding it inches above the table and lowering his mouth to the rim. “I should tell you one thing, though. Never rains but it pours. Paramount’s interested in a property I optioned last year. Terrorist hijacking thing. Cliché, cliché, cliché, I know. Mea culpa. Budgeted at forty-five. It’s not going to happen but I’ve still got to go to London to meet with some people about it.”
“What if it does happen?”
“I want to do your film, John.” For a moment the passion beneath the silken tan seemed real. In his obscure way Weller was explaining that he would rather be a producer who was a cult artist and rich than one who was commercial and excessively rich.
Hollywood, Pellam knew, is a crucible of tradeoffs.
“Next step?” he asked. He took a sip of coffee then poured it out. His gut was wound up. Not often is one offered the opportunity to direct his own picture and to go hopelessly into debt at the same time.
“I leave tomorrow night for London. Let me get on the horn now and see what I can do. But I give you my word, if we can work it, I’m doing Central Standard. It’ll be a bitch, but I’d tell Paramount so long, bye-bye. I don’t care how many effing zeros they wave in my face. Does that shock you, John? Does it?”
It did, but Pellam said, “No, Marty, it impresses me.”
THE BUNGALOWS WOULDN’T work. The interiors were too small for a Panaflex and lights and actors all at the same time. Sloan had wanted a complicated tracking shot where the camera on a doorway dolly starts in the yard and follows a character’s point of view into the living room. But he finally agreed with Pellam and the key grip that the scene would have to be edited together. They would shoot the exteriors of the bungalows (the most decrepit of the four) and the interiors in the parlor and living room of a two-story colonial next door.
Pellam left Tony Sloan barking instructions to the gaunt key grip, whose resilient humor from the first several weeks of shooting had vanished completely under the weight of tasks like this one: completing in six hours a setup that would normally take two days. Pellam hopped back on his cycle and drove to the bank that held the deeds on both houses. The banker, wearing a pastel green suit, had carefully read the standard location release and signed it, accepting the six-hundred-dollar check with an air of embarrassment.
“Most money them houses’ve made in two years.”
“Times’re rough round here, looks like.”
“Yessir, that they have been. I just wish this recession would hurry up and get done. We’ll get through it, though.”
Pellam returned to the bike and fired it up. As he drove through town he noticed a car following, keeping the same distance behind. Two people in the front seat, he believed. Pellam made two unnecessary turns. The car took the same route. He braked the cycle to a stop and pretended to look into a storefront window of dusty antiques while the driver of the car stopped and pretended to look at a map. Eyes still scanning the window of the store, Pellam suddenly popped the bike into first and squealed away from the stop, turning down a narrow walkway between two deserted buildings, a space just wide enough to leave about an inch on either side of the handlebar grips. He could touch neither the front brake nor clutch without leaving knuckle skin on brick.
When he emerged from the alley he braked to a fast stop and saw the car was skidding to a halt at the far end of the alley. Pellam made a sharp turn down a one-way street and aimed toward a strip of brown river. After he had driven for a block he felt a strong sense of déjà vu and slowed, dropping down into first gear. The car was nowhere around him and, guided by instinct, he turned right and parked. He was on Third Street, next to a series of low factories and warehouses.
From here he could see what had at one time probably been Maddox’s budding riverfront scene. Now it contained only empty storefronts, uninspired antique stores, bars and Callaghan’s Steak House.
This was also the place where Donnie Buffett had been shot. Pellam noticed something beside his booted foot. Bloodstains, he believed, though they may have been nothing more than antifreeze or chocolate milk.
“I’ll keep an eye on them, you want to get a bag or something.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks.”
Pellam parked the bike and found a phone booth. The phone worked, which surprised him. Upon calling directory assistance, he also was surprised to learn that the address he sought was only a block away.
PELLAM DID NOT care for the smell of the place.
Something about antiseptics, that sweet cheap-perfume smell of chilly stuff that gets dabbed on your skin before they cut or stick.
Also the design was depressing: aluminum, bright vinyl, linoleum. For some reason, orange was very popular. Orange and purple. Pellam had been in old hospitals, where you really got a sense of Medicine—dark woodwork and brass and pale green. As if somebody were discovering anesthetic or penicillin behind one of the gold-stenciled doors.
Maddox General was like life and death in Kmart.
Pellam signed in. The nurse pointed him down the hallway. Pellam walked past a cop stationed at the head of the corridor. He eyed Pellam carefully. “Hold up there, sir.”
“I’d like to see Officer Buffett.”
“You’re the witness.” The cop’s stony face remained immobile; his eyes painted Pellam up and down.
“I just want to see how he’s doing.”
“Open your jacket.”
“I—”
“You want
to see him, open your jacket.”
Pellam opened his jacket. The cop frisked him roughly and motioned toward Buffett’s room.
On the TV was a game show. The sound was low; everything but the loudest applause was inaudible. The reception wasn’t very good and there was a thick band of distortion through the center of the screen. The host and the contestants were smiling a lot.
Buffett wasn’t.
“How you doing?” Pellam asked and identified himself.
“I remember you.”
Pellam walked to a gray chair. He stood as if deciding whether or not to sit. “I brought you this.” He put a book, a recent best-seller, on the table. “It’s a mystery. I don’t know if you like them.”
Buffett kept staring at him.
Pellam cleared his throat. The silence filled in again. He said, “I didn’t know if you’d like a bottle. What d’you drink anyway? Beer?”
“I got shot in the back.”
“I heard. How you feeling?”
“How do you think I feel?”
Silence again. Pellam decided there wasn’t going to be any lighthearted banter and joshing. He stood back from the chair and crossed his arms. “Look. I’m sorry about what happened. But I’d like to ask a favor. Your buddies in the police department, a couple detectives particularly, are giving me a pretty hard time. You know, following me. They think I saw this guy who was in the car—”
Buffett, eyes on the TV screen, blurted, “Well, you did.”
“I didn’t see him,” Pellam said evenly. “I know you think I did. But I didn’t.”
Buffett kept staring at the tube. His eyes were dark, agitated. He licked the corner of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. This made him seem like a cornered animal. “How could you help but? He was in the front seat.”
“There was glare.”
“The hell there was glare.”
Pellam’s face flushed. “You think I’m covering up something? I’m not. I described the guy who bumped into me.”
“Oh, that’s mighty brave of you. I saw him. We don’t need his description. Anyway, he’s rabbited. He was just the hired gun and he’s back in Miami or Chicago by now.”
Bloody River Blues: A Location Scout Mystery Page 7