Shoot the Dog

by Brad Smith

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” he said.

  But enough time to go for a workout, Claire thought. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.

  “I don’t have anything to tell you anyway,” he added.

  “But you don’t know what I’m going to ask,” Claire said.

  “I’m just telling you that I’m in the dark,” Levi said. “So I intend to make this quick.”

  “Sit down,” Claire said lightly. “I’ll do the intending around here.”

  Levi Brown sat, shaking his head slightly to free his blond tresses from the damp towel around his neck. His arms were large and impressive, at least to look at, the kind of arms a man got from lifting weights, not from actual work. Arms, Claire suspected, that were solely intended to look good in a tight T-shirt, which is what the producer had been wearing earlier. Claire thought of Virgil, of his hard, muscular body, usually sporting a random cut or bruise somewhere from repairing machinery or fixing fences. She was certain he’d never visited a gym or lifted a weight in his life, and she couldn’t see him shopping for T-shirts based on how they made his arms look. In fact, she was pretty sure he bought his shirts at the TSC store, probably while buying binder twine or grease fittings.

  “How well did you know Olivia Burns?” she began.

  “I don’t know how to answer that,” Levi said. “How well do we know anybody?”

  “You going to get philosophical on me?” Claire asked. “I thought you were in a hurry.”

  “Okay,” he said, as if despairing of her provincial attitude. “On one hand, I was her employer. On the other hand, we were on friendly terms.”

  “When did you meet?”

  “About . . . two months ago. No, closer to three. Sam and I flew to Seattle to meet with her, to talk about the film.”

  “Who is Sam?”

  “Sam Sawchuk,” Levi said, frowning, as if puzzled that Claire wouldn’t know this. “She’s my co-producer.”

  “So that’s where Olivia Burns is from—Seattle?”

  “No,” Levi said. His impatience with Claire was now palpable; he stopped just short of rolling his eyes. “She was finishing a film in Seattle—the Baumberger feature? You must have heard of that movie.”

  “We’ll be better off here if you don’t assume I know anything about the business you’re in,” Claire said.

  “That’s obvious.”

  “You might also want to drop the snotty attitude,” Claire added. “Do that and we’ll get along just dandy. Okay?”

  The movie producer fell into a bit of a sulk then. That was fine with Claire. She’d been in his presence for only a few minutes and had already decided she didn’t care for him much. Something about him suggested he’d been spoiled from a young age. She wondered if he was an only child.

  “So you’ve known her roughly three months,” she said. “Did she ever discuss her personal life with you? By that I specifically mean any problems she might have been having?”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “Medical problems. Depression. Boyfriend problems, drugs? Anything at all.”

  “No.”

  “Did she seem fearful of anything? Celebrities sometimes have stalkers. Did she ever ask for security?”

  “No,” Levi said.

  “So you never got the sense that she was dealing with something out there?” Claire asked. “Something that might have been bothering her?”

  “Never,” Levi said. “She was a very normal person. Matter of fact, I’d say she was better-adjusted than most.”

  “Than most what? Actresses?”

  “People.”

  Claire looked down at her notebook, filled basically with inconsequential statements from the crew. “When did you see her last?” she asked.

  “Last night. I was in the bar across the foyer there, having a drink with Sam Sawchuk, talking about the shoot. Olivia had dinner at Finnegan’s with Ronnie Red Hawk. He’s . . . um . . . an investor in the film. We saw them leave the restaurant and walk across the lobby to the elevators.”

  “Ronnie Red Hawk is an investor?” Claire asked. “I thought he was a producer.”

  “All right,” Levi conceded. “He’s a minor producer.”

  “I didn’t know they came in different sizes,” Claire said. “Where are you on the scale?”

  “At the pinnacle,” he said defiantly.

  Claire smiled. “So why did you fire Peter Dunmore?”

  She caught him off guard with the bluff. She had no idea whether Dunmore had been fired or not. He glared at her as if she’d stuck her nose where it didn’t belong and now he was being forced to humor her. “He wasn’t fired. He quit.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows?” Levi said. “Money, artistic differences, whatever. Happens all the time. I leave that shit to the creative types.”

  “You’re not a creative type?”

  “I’m a money guy,” he replied. “Without me, there is no movie.”

  “I can tell you’re a powerful man,” Claire said, not hiding her sarcasm. “Was Dunmore pissed off when he left?”

  “No idea,” Levi snapped. He obviously didn’t care for Claire’s flip assessment of him. “I just told you—that’s not my bailiwick.”

  “Right, you’re the money guy,” Claire said. “What time was it when Olivia and Red Hawk left the restaurant?”

  “Ten o’clock or so.”

  “And what time did you and Ms. Sawchuk leave the bar?”

  “Maybe a half hour later?”

  “And you went to your rooms then? Or someplace else?”

  “To our rooms. We rode up together.”

  “Same floor?”

  “No. I’m on the fifth, Sam and Robb Fetterman—the director—are on the seventh.”

  “Together?”

  “They’re married.”

  Claire hadn’t known that and she made a note of it. She paused. She didn’t have much else to ask the sullen producer.

  “One last thing,” she said. “Have you seen anybody on the periphery of this situation that you might regard as suspicious? You know, hanging around the hotel, or the filming itself. Anybody at all that doesn’t fit in?”

  “No,” Levi said. “And Sam and I can vouch for the crew. We’ve worked with them before.” He hesitated as something came to him. “Wait a minute. There is somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “The horse wrangler on set. There’s something off about the guy. Like a Boo Radley thing. You know who that is?”

  “Yeah, I know who that is,” Claire said. “You say this guy’s a horse wrangler. What’s his name?”

  It took Levi a moment to remember. “Calls himself Virgil. But you know, he’s never actually said if that’s his first name or his last. And he makes us pay him in cash. Which suggests to me that the guy’s off the grid, so it isn’t his real name anyway.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “I don’t know how you’d get in touch with him, but we have a number for his boss. Guy’s name is Cain. I can get it for you.”

  “I’ll find it,” Claire said. “So what’s off about the guy?”

  “His attitude,” Levi said. “Like he doesn’t have any respect for anything. And he’s one of those guys, got a smart mouth, trying to hide the fact that he’s not very bright. You know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean,” Claire said. “When you say he doesn’t have any respect for anything, you mean for the movie and all that?”

  “Exactly,” Levi said. “He likes to act the wise guy, and you don’t pull that shit where I’m from. I came close to punching his lights out yesterday. I might still.”

  “Punch him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hope I’m there when you do,” Claire said. “I’d love to watch.”

  • • •

  When the producer was gone Claire sat at the table and went through her notebook before closing it up. Other than finding out there was something allegedly off about the man
she’d been sleeping with the past couple of years, she hadn’t really learned anything. Levi Brown had actually been right on that last count. There was something off about Virgil. Which is why Claire had been attracted to him since the moment she’d met him, even though he’d been in police custody at the time.

  Walking out into the lobby, she saw Joe Brady emerge from the restaurant with a man and a woman, the man in black jeans and the woman wearing leggings and an oversize white T-shirt. They said something to Joe before moving off toward the elevators. Joe spotted Claire and walked over.

  “Well?”

  “Nobody saw nuttin’, ” she replied.

  “Same here.”

  “Who was that?” Claire asked, indicating the departing couple.

  “The producer and the director,” Joe said.

  “They tell you anything interesting?”

  “Not really.”

  “They would know everyone on the crew. Did they see any strangers hanging around?”

  Joe stifled a yawn. “The woman said there was some big Samoan or something in the bar last night. Nobody knew him. She thought he might have been a wrestler.”

  “Why a wrestler?”

  “Because he was big, I guess.”

  Claire glanced toward the elevators. “You interviewed them together?”

  “Yeah. I was trying to save some time. They’re married to each other, so I killed two birds with one stone.”

  “Where were they last night?”

  “In their room from eight o’clock on.”

  Claire watched as the two people in question got on the elevator. The woman turned and looked directly at her as the doors closed.

  “I just talked to a guy who said he was in the bar with the Sawchuk woman until around ten thirty,” Claire said, still watching the closed doors. Now she looked at Joe. “And yet they’re telling you different.”

  “Well, they’re in agreement on it,” Joe said.

  “Of course they are, when you interview them together.”

  “Must be nice, always being right, Claire.”

  “I’ll let you know if it ever happens,” she replied. She continued to look at Joe. There’d been a time when she might have expected him to admit that he screwed up, but that time was long past. Not that she cared anyway, not about that part of it. “If nothing else, we’ve got something to go on. At least one of those three people lied to us. So you know what we have to do now.”

  “Find out which one?” Joe said.

  “Find out why.”

  TEN

  At first light Wednesday morning Virgil loaded Bob and Nelly in the trailer and headed for Fairfield Village. With the death of the lead actress, the filming had shut down for exactly one day. Tommy Alamosa had called him at eight o’clock Tuesday night to tell him he was needed the following morning.

  The day was overcast but the rain that had been promised never materialized. The radio was calling now for clearing in the afternoon. Virgil arrived at the pioneer village just before eight and unloaded the horses into the corral. Tommy walked over a few minutes later carrying coffees from craft services and told him they would be shooting some schoolhouse scenes today, which led Virgil to ask where Tommy thought the two draft horses might fit in.

  “I had this idea when I was flipping through the book last night,” Tommy said. “I thought it would be a nice visual, the daughter riding a huge workhorse bareback along that dirt lane over there.” He pointed to the far end of the village, where a mud path emerged from the heavy forest. “You know—coming to school in the morning. Would your mare be okay with that?”

  “Probably not,” Virgil said, thinking about Nelly’s cantankerous nature. He tried the coffee, which was pretty good. “But I imagine Bob would. He’s about as excitable as a rock. I put one of my neighbor’s kids on his back one day last summer and Bob walked around the field like he was in the Veteran’s Day parade.” He took another drink. “What about the little girl, though?”

  “She’s all for it,” Tommy said. “Girls and horses, you know? We’re going to wait and shoot it later, though. We’re supposed to get some sunshine this afternoon, give us a nice contrast coming out of the shade of the trees there. It won’t be early morning but we can make it look like it is.”

  Virgil watched the horses in the corral. “I don’t have a bridle for riding.”

  Tommy shook his head. “No, we’ll want you to use the harness and stuff from before. That’s what they’d do back then, take the horse from the plow and throw the kid on it.”

  Virgil nodded. “I didn’t think you’d be filming anything today.”

  “After the Olivia thing?” Tommy asked. “Neither did I. I have the feeling that the theory is to keep on like nothing happened, although I don’t know how you can call that nothing. But otherwise, the money might disappear, and if that happens it’s a real cluster fuck. A lot of it is covered by insurance but not all of it. So it looks like we’re going to shoot around the lead until they cast somebody else.”

  “How do they do that?”

  “It won’t be hard,” Tommy said. “You can bet there’s been a hundred agents trying to get hold of Sam since the news broke. She’ll drag it out a few days, milk it for all it’s worth for the press it’ll get. But I’m betting they’ll cast somebody by the weekend.”

  “And forget all about Olivia Burns?”

  “Shit, they already have,” Tommy said.

  Virgil walked to the trailer, set his coffee on the fender, and went inside for a half bale of hay, which he tossed over the rail fence to the two draft horses. They were standing in the shade of the fake livery stable, and they showed no interest in the feed. Virgil retrieved his coffee and walked back to where Tommy stood, leaning against the box of Virgil’s old pickup.

  “So I guess I just needed to bring Bob today.”

  “This way, you get paid for both,” Tommy told him. “And your wrangler fee.”

  “Levi whatshisname might not like that.”

  “Fuck him,” Tommy said. He tossed the remains of his coffee in the grass. “One of the perks of my job is pissing that phony fucker off.”

  • • •

  After Tommy went off to set up whatever they were going to shoot first, Virgil got a brush from the cab of the truck and went into the corral to give the horses a cleaning they didn’t really need. But he couldn’t stand around all day doing nothing. It made for a long day, but more than that, it really didn’t feel right, not when he was being paid.

  As he worked, he watched the comings and goings of all the people around the trailers and RVs at the end of the village. As they had on Monday, the crew was laughing and joking as they went about their business. From where Virgil stood, there didn’t seem to be any sense of mourning about them, something that might be expected when the star of the film had been found dead, floating in a creek, roughly twenty-four hours earlier.

  At one point, he saw Levi Brown pull up in the black Audi, then disappear into a trailer. A few minutes later he watched Sam Sawchuk and the director, Robb, cross the lot and enter the same trailer.

  After grooming the two horses, Virgil decided to grease the front suspension of his truck, another job that really didn’t need doing. He was lying in the grass, most of his body beneath the Ford, working the grease gun on the tie rod ends, when he heard footsteps and looked over to see two small pink sneakers protruding from the hem of a gingham dress.

  “Hello, Georgia,” he said.

  “Hi, Virgil.”

  He came out from under the truck and wiped his hands on a rag before stowing the grease gun behind the seat. Aside from the modern footwear, the little girl wore the same clothes as when they’d shot the buckboard scenes on Monday. Her bonnet was hanging off the back of her neck by the tie strings. Her fine blonde hair was mussed up from the cap. Her eyes were red.

  “How’re you doing?” Virgil asked.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  Virgil watched her as she glanced around, as if
not knowing where to look. What to do. She was the first person he’d seen who appeared to be upset about the death of Olivia Burns. Even Tommy Alamosa had been pretty jaded about the whole thing. Virgil wondered if anybody had talked to the kid about it. Looking at the hustle and bustle over in the town, where lights and cameras and large coils of cables were being carried into the schoolhouse, he somehow doubted it. But somebody should. She was just a goddamn kid.

  “That was sad about Olivia,” he said.

  Georgia looked up quickly; she seemed surprised that he would mention it. “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “She was nice. She was really nice.”

  “How well did you know her?”

  “We just met,” the little girl said. “But she was, like, super friendly to me. She told me that I could run lines with her anytime I wanted. And she even gave me her cell phone number. Her personal phone. She told me not to give it to anybody else. That was pretty cool.”

  “That means you made an impression on her,” Virgil said.

  “I guess.” She looked at Bob and Nelly tucked away in the shade of the livery, their tails flicking at the flies now buzzing around them. “I only met her three times,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m so sad, but I am.”

  “That means she made an impression on you,” Virgil said.

  The little girl thought about that for a time and then smiled at Virgil. “Maybe it does,” she said. “You’re smart.”

  “You might be the only one around here who thinks that,” Virgil said. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep it to yourself.”

  “Okay,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper.

  Virgil looked over toward the trailers, wondering again why the kid seemed to be alone. “Are your parents here?”

  “No,” she said. “They’re divorced. My dad’s a musician, so he’s on the road a lot. He plays the oboe. You know what that is?”

  “Some kind of flute?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Is your mother here?”

  “Nope. She’s in Spain. She’s writing a book about the Spanish Civil War. It happened back in the 1930s.”

  “So you’re here all by yourself?” Virgil asked.