“I’m Lou,” the girl said. I introduced myself and Hilly. “You’re friends of Reeny’s, aren’t you?” Lou said.
“Who’s Reeny?” Hilly asked.
“Irene Lindsey,” Lou said, pointing toward Lionel’s roof. “She’s the one in the Salome outfit being tied to the post.” A post, I might add, that had magically and totally illogically sprouted from the middle of Lionel’s roof deck. The stagehands had secured Reeny to the post by wrapping a thick rope around her and the post, three turns just below her breasts, which, despite the costume, still looked significantly more impressive than Reeny’s natural equipment. From where we stood, I could see her holding the rope ends together behind the post. That will make escaping a lot easier, I thought to myself as Lou said, “She plays — ”
“Virgin,” Hilly interrupted. “My god, Dad. You know Virgin.”
“In a manner of speaking,” I admitted.
“Oh, that’s so cool.”
She was, I discovered, a Star Crossed fan.
chapter seventeen
“I’ve been trying to reach you for half an hour,” Linda said when I called the Sylvia. As it happened, Hilly had left Linda a note that she was coming to see me. Tactfully ignoring the fact that I’d been out of the house for barely ten minutes, I told Linda that Hilly was fine and I’d bring her back to the hotel later. Meanwhile, on the roof of Lionel’s house, the director was walking the cast and crew through the fight scenes. It was a fascinating and complex process that made still photography look like child’s play. Kenny Shapiro may have been a stupid prick with a mammary fixation, but he seemed to know his business. Or perhaps it was that the people around him knew theirs.
While Virgin, breasts heaving and muscles cording, struggled heroically to free herself from the post to which she was secured, Star engaged the minions of the evil alien porn merchant, ridiculous in his gaudy pimp suit. She easily dispatched the first two, both hulking males, in a series of slow motion sequences involving both Ricky Rice and her stunt double, while camera angles were checked and blocking was adjusted.
Everything seemed to go smoothly until it came time for Star to do battle with the busty lady in the thigh boots. After a couple of clumsy run-throughs, Ricky Rice and the director stood toe to toe and shrieked unintelligibly into each other’s faces for a couple of minutes, while everyone stood around waiting patiently for the ego-stoked fireworks to end. Then they settled down, the porn starlet’s makeup was repaired, and they walked through the fight sequences again, once with Ricky Rice and Mr. See-em-sweat’s porn starlet pantomiming the easier moves, then again with their respective stunt doubles performing the more physically demanding throws and falls, leaps and kicks. In the final sequence, Star’s stunt double pantomimed flipping her opponent over her shoulder and off the roof. There was a Zodiac with a pair of wet-suited divers aboard riding the tide near where the stunt-woman would hit the water. I suspected the porn star-let’s stunt double had plenty of flotation material in her costume, but they weren’t taking chances.
In the final sequence, Star went one-on-one with the evil alien porn merchant himself. He seemed to be getting the better of it until Virgin, who had worked loose from her restraints, leapt to Star’s aid. Between them, and their various stunt doubles, they subdued the evil alien, making the world safe once again, at least until the next episode.
Throughout the rehearsal Barry Chisholm’s flock kept up a continuous cacophony of wailing and screeching, while an equal number of onlookers railed at them to shut up and Mabel Firth and her partner tried vainly to make peace.
Rehearsal concluded, the director and the performers took a break, disappearing below, while the crew readied the set for the actual shooting.
“Pretty neat, eh, Dad?” Hilly said.
“Yup,” I agreed.
Lou, the young PA, beamed.
“What about all the noise?” I asked her.
“No big deal. They redo the sound in post anyway.”
“When will they do it for real?” Hilly asked.
Lou checked her watch. It was almost eight and starting to get dark. “Half an hour or so,” she said. “As soon as it’s dark enough.” She stared into space for a second or two, pressing her fingertips to the headset speaker in her right ear, then excused herself and scurried off on an errand.
“You really know Irene Lindsey,” Hilly said to me.
“Really,” I said. “In fact, you’ll get to meet her. She’s staying with me right now. In the guest room,” I added quickly, lest she get the wrong idea.
“You’re kidding. Wow!” Growing suspicious, she said, “Is that the real reason you wanted me to stay with Mom?”
“No. And while we’re on the subject of your mother, I think you owe her an apology. It wasn’t very considerate of you to take off like that. She was worried about you.”
“Yeah, well,” Hilly said, “maybe if she wasn’t on my case all the time about going to Australia.”
“I thought you wanted to go,” I said.
“I changed my mind,” she said. “She can’t make me go, can she?”
“No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to, Scout,” I said. “But I really think you’d be missing out on a great opportunity. Besides, if you really hate it, you can always come back.”
“Well…” she said doubtfully.
The dark gathered around us. Preparations continued on the roof of Lionel Oliphant’s house. The protesters’ voices were beginning to sound a little ragged and the volume was diminishing, despite Barry Chisholm’s exhortations. It ramped up a bit when the director and a woman carrying a bulky binder appeared on Lionel’s roof deck and began walking around, consulting the contents of the binder and making notes, but quickly petered out again when nothing more interesting happened. The crowd of onlookers on the other side of the barricades began to thin.
There was a shout from somewhere below us, on the Sea Village docks, then people running. Lou, the PA, hurried over to where Hilly and I stood, expression serious as she listened to her radio. She spoke in hushed but urgent tones into the microphone, nodding, then looked at Hilly and me.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“They found a man on the dock,” she said. She listened again, nodded again, and said, “He’s unconscious. It looks like he’s been attacked.”
As she spoke, I saw Mabel Firth and Baz Tucker leave their positions by the crane pad and hurry down the ramp to Sea Village. As she ran, right hand on her pistol holster to steady her heavy equipment belt, Mabel spoke into the mike clipped to her left shoulder.
“Stay here,” I said to Hilly. I looked at the young PA. She looked worried, unsure of herself. The burly, grey-bearded security guard manning the barrier at the top of the ramp looked more than capable of taking care of himself, but he had his job to do, and that didn’t include babysitting my daughter. I changed my mind. “No, you’d better come with me,” I said to Hilly. “But stay close.”
I went down the ramp, Hilly close behind me. As the gate to the main dock swung shut behind us, I saw a knot of people, from the production company as well as Sea Village residents, clustered around the junction of the main dock and the first finger dock, by Freeman and Summer Thom’s house. Mabel Firth was bent over a dark man-shaped object lying across the finger dock, speaking into her shoulder mike. Her partner was standing with his back to the small crowd, arms wide, keeping them back. I peered over his shoulder.
“Anyone know this man?” Mabel asked. She shone her flashlight on his face.
Around me the others murmured, “No,” they didn’t know him, but I did.
“His name is Willson Quayle,” I said.
“He’s not dead, is he?” Hilly asked in a hushed voice.
“No,” Mabel said. “Looks like someone clocked him good on the head, but he isn’t dead.”
Willson Quayle muttered and tried to sit up.
“Stay down,” Mabel said. “Did you see who hit you?” she asked him.
He mumbled something unintelligible.
Mabel shook her head. “Gimme your hands.” He stared at her with an expression of incomprehension on his face. “Your hands,” she repeated.
He held out his hands and she ratcheted handcuffs onto his wrists. Then she turned her head and spoke into her shoulder mike, speaking in the arcane coded language of police-speak, but no doubt asking the dispatcher to send backup and inform major crimes that the suspect in the bomb threats in Vancouver and Richmond earlier today was in custody and possibly injured.
She stood, nodded to Baz, who took over keeping an eye on Quayle, and came over to where Hilly and I were standing with the others.
“Who found him?” she asked.
“I did,” replied a man I didn’t know. He wore a headset similar to that worn by Lou, the PA.
“And you are…?”
“Chick — uh, William Roberts. I work for Star Productions.” He showed her an ID card on a cord around his neck.
“Did you see anyone else?”
“No. I was going back to the set when I saw him lying there.”
“Any of you other people see anything?” Her question elicited a chorus of negatives. “All right, then, you can all go back to what you were doing,” she added sternly.
“Does that include me?” I asked her as the crowd dispersed.
“No, you’d better stick around. Mr. Roberts, you can go back to work, but the investigators will probably want to talk to you.”
“I’ll be around,” he said. “Just ask any of the PAs to call me on the radio.” Mabel nodded and he left.
“Hi, Hilly,” Mabel said when he’d gone. “I hear you’re going to live in Australia for a while. That’s cool. I’ve always wanted to go there. Bring me back a koala?”
“I don’t think you’re allowed,” Hilly said.
“I guess not. Is there someone you can stay with while I talk to your dad?”
Hilly looked at me. I said, “Maggie’s at home, I think.”
“Can’t I go back and watch them film?” she asked.
“I’d rather you stayed with Maggie. Or with me.”
Mabel said, “This’ll only take a minute. Why don’t you wait over there where we can see you?” She pointed to the bench at the end of the main dock by the sewage extraction shed. When Hilly was out of earshot, Mabel said, “This is the guy you think called in the bomb hoaxes at your studio and at the toy company’s offices in Richmond? What’s he doing around here?”
“Looking for me, I suppose.”
“To do what?”
“I dunno. To give me a piece of what’s left of his mind? He probably blames me for losing his job with the toy company. I don’t think he’s really dangerous, though. Who do you think hit him?”
“You’d be at the top of my list,” she said, “if I didn’t know you and Hilly were on the embankment at the time. His wallet’s missing. It could’ve been a mugging, I suppose, but maybe he just tripped, hit his head, and his wallet fell out of his pocket into the water.”
Baz Tucker shone his flashlight into the dark, scummy water between the main dock and the embankment.
“Guv, there’s somethin’ floatin’ in the water here.”
I looked at Mabel. “Guv?”
To me: “Baz watches too many British cop shows.” To her partner, on his knees by the edge of the dock: “What is it?”
He stood. “Some kinda doll,” he said. He handed it to her and she examined it in the bright beam of his flashlight.
It was another Virgin action figure. The left arm, though, was missing at the elbow, the stump gory with simulated blood. There were gaping wounds in both sturdy rubber thighs. And the front of the Barbarella cheerleader costume was slashed away to reveal mutilated breasts.
“Bloody hell,” Mabel breathed.
The paramedics arrived. They pronounced Quayle’s injuries minor, but because he was still muzzy-headed and confused, they strapped him onto a gurney and took him away, accompanied by Baz Tucker, who took the mutilated Virgin doll with him in a plastic evidence bag. A pair of plainclothes detectives spoke to Mabel, then to me, asking me the same questions Mabel had, then sent me on my way.
“Sorry,” I said to Hilly, who was still sitting waiting on the bench by the pump house.
“I hope we haven’t missed everything,” she said as we climbed the ramp. Our bearded friend manning the barricade let us through and we met Lou as we walked along the boardwalk toward our previous vantage point. The roof of Lionel’s house was deserted — except for the camera operators, sound technicians, stagehands, props people, and script girls.
“Did we miss it all?” Hilly asked, voice dull with disappointment.
“No,” Lou said. “Shooting was delayed. Because of the man on the dock, I guess. Was he hurt bad?”
“No,” I said.
A couple more people with clipboards and headsets appeared on Lionel’s roof, joined shortly by Mr. See-em-sweat in his director’s jacket, who consulted briefly with a camera operator encased in an elaborate Steadicam rig. Then the cast entered, two each of Star, the porn merchant, the buxom lady in the thigh boots, but only one each of the hulking male assistant stooges, played by stuntmen. And only one Virgin, who joined the other stunt doubles out of camera range, while the principals found their marks and took up the same positions as before. A pair of stagehands stood by the post, waiting to secure Reeny/Virgin thereon.
“Where’s Reeny?” Hilly wondered.
“Dunno,” I said, wondering the same thing myself.
Lou pressed her fingers to the headset earpiece, listening with a look of intense concentration on her face.
“What is it?” I asked.
“They can’t find Reeny,” she said.
“What do you mean, they can’t find her?” I said.
“She isn’t in Mr. Oliphant’s house,” Lou said.
“Where could she have gone?”
“They sent someone to your house to see if she was there, but no one answered.”
On the roof of Lionel’s house, the stunt Virgin moved into position by the post. The stagehands wrapped the rope around her.
“They’ll do close-ups later,” Lou explained.
I wondered where Reeny had got to. Surely she wouldn’t have skipped out in the middle of a shoot, even if she had got into an argument with Mr. See-em-sweat over the changes he’d made to the scene or her costume. Perhaps it was part of her strategy to convince them to write her out of the series.
Watching a film being shot isn’t at all like seeing the final product on the screen. Especially action sequences. The components of the sequence aren’t necessarily filmed in order. There are no sound or visual effects. And from almost any angle other than the camera’s, it’s glaringly obvious that the punches and kicks aren’t landing. It’s a slow, tedious, and time-consuming process that makes professional wrestling look real, and after the first few sequences, Hilly was bored out of her mind.
“I’ll get my car keys and take you back to the hotel,” I told her.
“Can’t I stay with you?”
“Not tonight,” I said.
We said good night to Lou and the security guard and went down the ramp onto the dock.
“What do you think happened to Virgin?” Hilly asked as we got to the house. “I mean Reeny.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I unlocked the door and we went inside. I closed the door and followed Hilly into the living room.
“It’s about goddamned time,” Chris Hastings said. “Who’s the kid?”
Reeny sat stiffly in the easy chair opposite the sofa, still in her Virgin makeup, short red wig, and yellow contacts. She wore a khaki trench coat over her harem girl costume.
“What’s going on?” I said. To Reeny: “Are you all right?”
“She’s fine,” Hastings answered for her. He didn’t look good at all. He was very agitated, couldn’t seem to stand still. His hair was stiff and tangled, his complexion sallow, and he exuded
a sour odour of dried perspiration. “No thanks to you.”
“I’m fine,” she confirmed. “I was freezing on the set and came to get a coat when I ran into Will Quayle. He’s the one who’s been leaving the dolls.”
“I know,” I said. “Was it you who knocked him out?”
“It was me,” Hastings replied. “You should thank me.”
“Is he all right?” Reeny asked.
“He’ll live,” I said. I looked at Hastings. “They aren’t here,” I said.
“Yeah, Reeny tried to tell me that too,” he said. “I didn’t believe her either. So stop wasting my time. The sooner you hand them over, the sooner you two can get back to playing house.”
“We don’t have them,” I said.
“Then how do you know about them?”
“A pair of gentlemen calling themselves Evans and Rogers, who claimed to represent the rightful owners, told me about them.”
“Tall, thin black man and a stocky white guy with a head like a bullet?”
“You know them?” I said.
“No, but I know who they are. Damn,” he said, running his hand through his tangled hair and pacing back and forth across the living room.
“Daddy?” Hilly said. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing to worry about, Scout,” I said. “Reeny, this is my daughter. Hilly, Reeny Lindsey, also known as Virgin.”
“Hi,” Hilly said.
“Pleased to meet you, Hilly,” Reeny replied, standing to shake Hilly’s hand. Then she said, “Chris?”
Hastings stopped pacing. “What?”
“I have to get back to work.”
“What?” he said again, distracted. “No, you’re not going anywhere till I get what I came for.” He gestured for her to sit back down. She sank into the chair. “Where are they?” he said to me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
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