Lucy knocked back the rest of her wine, threw a ten down to cover the eight dollar glass, and headed home. She hiked up the stairs and after checking her messages she got Claud ready for an adventure and then headed back out for a walk down to Battery Park. She could deal with the messages on her cell phone while roundtripping to the park and back. With all the new greenery stretching north along the Hudson, the route straight down Broadway and then back up through the park and home through Soho had become her favorite walk, a perfect combination of urban, in-your-face street-stomping followed by the serene pleasures of a leisurely riverfront park stroll climaxed with a walk down Memory Lane, crossing the old neighborhood.
She headed out and dialed in. “Hi Manny, this is Lucy Ripken returning your call. To answer your questions, yes, I have been working on the script changes you’re concerned about; and no, I have not finished with anything yet. However, I…hey Manny, how are you? Yeah, fine. Sort of. Uh-huh…No…then I guess nobody’s called you? About the news? Manny, the producer…yes, Wadsworth—was killed last night. Yes. That’s right. Strangled. I know, it’s awful, but…Yes, the money’s still there, for the moment at least. Yes, Paul says we’re moving forward. No, no suspects. I should say, no arrests. But your co-star Carole is missing since it happened and the police seem to be….I know, I know, she’s just an innocent girl and he’s a big guy and…hey, I don’t think she did either but…yeah. Yes. Listen, We need to talk a little more, about this and also about your script stuff. Can you meet me tomorrow morning for breakfast? Raoul’s? I haven’t been there in years. They do breakfast now? OK. Sure. Ten o’clock. Yes, it would be better if she didn’t, and also if Jack showed up halfway through that would be good. Right. See you then.” She closed the phone and turned it off. He had seemed genuinely surprised to hear about Wadsworth. But then again he was a very good actor.
By the time she’d reached home, night had fallen, she’d deposited her big fat ten thousand dollar check in the ATM at her own bank branch on Canal Street, and she had a short list of suspects. The suspects were obvious: Paul, for the money; Carole, accidentally on purpose, for some kind of sex-rush, or maybe money too; Manny, out of jealousy. She didn’t believe any of them did it. But any of them could have. Carole could have watched him die in some sort of twisted climax to their sordid night. Paul could have spent some of his movie budget to hire a hit man to strangle him, to get control of the money. Manny could have hired a hit man through his mafia contacts and had him done in a jealous rage over Carole.
Maybe Paul’s bullshit about Wadsworth worrying about being ‘in over his head’ had some truth to it. These three as suspects struck her as too obvious, too simple in each case. Then again sometimes the obvious answer was the right one.
This stuff was not her problem. Her problem for the moment was Manny and the movie. She got home to find a single message on her landline, from Mistress Dezira, sounding slightly scared, wanting to talk.
CHAPTER FIVE
ADVANCING THE PLOT
Lucy threw some leftover black beans and brown rice into a big white bowl, nuked it, dumped salsa on top, then sat down at her desk with her laptop open to the screenplay-in-progress, where she scrolled in to the scene at the Italian restaurant featuring Delia, Delia’s dad Conrad, and the Italian guy, called Nick.
Delia and Nick are falling for each other over a glass of wine, or at least flirting away like a couple of normal twenty-somethings, when her Dad comes in. He’s upset still about the pickle store that used to be; or so it seems, and so Delia believes, but the truth we know and Delia doesn’t is he’s just discovered that she is not his daughter and aside from being heartbroken and shocked, Conrad’s not quite sure how he feels about it—about her—other than at the moment he’s pissed at the Italian because he’s the only available target. Lucy knew that this heartbroken rage somehow needed to include a subtle hint of unacknowledged sexual jealousy or something similar that crossed, however gingerly, into that more complicated emotional terrain without killing all sympathy for Conrad—who is after all suffering from the twin hammer blows of discovering his wife for years had been screwing Morris, his brother—or his oldest, long lost friend?—and that the brother or friend was Delia’s “real” father. Somehow.
The audience’s sympathy for Conrad, easily earned by his twin tragic revelations, could just as easily be squandered if he has an obvious hard-on for his own erstwhile daughter. Envisioning the scene and its emotional implications, Lucy couldn’t help but think in such crude terms, having heard about the business with Manny and Carole. And Wadsworth, now dead. God this was a sticky, tricky story. That somehow had her stumped, staring at the screen as she wolfed down beans and rice. By way of distraction, she picked up the phone and returned Dezira’s call.
“Yeah?” The honking voice of a teenage boy from Queens.
“Hi, is, um…Dezira there?”
“Dezira? Ha. Yeah, right. Hey Maggie, some lady wants ta talk ta you. N’ hurry up huh I’m expectin’ a call. Who the fuck you kiddin’ with this Dezira shit?” Though he’d dropped the phone Lucy couldn’t help but hear him, foreground over the background racket of a family house somewhere east of the East River and west of JFK.
“Shut up Michael,” Lucy heard her hiss. “This is none of your business. Now get outta my room, mongrel scum.”
“Ma, Maggie’s cussin’ me out again,” he honked. A door slammed.
“This is Dezira. Who’s calling?”
“Lucy. Lucy Ripken.” She waited. “Should I call you Dezira or Maggie?”
A hesitation. “Maggie’s fine. It’s just…”
“Your brother.”
“Yeah. I’m livin’ at home until I can get some scratch together and, you know, get a place.”
“Hey, I’ve been there.” She waited. Nothing. “So what’s up?”
“You were at the club the other night—when that guy died later. I got your name from the other movie guy—Paul. He’s on our mailing list. You came in after them, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.” Lucy giggled, lightening her up. “You asked me if I wanted to spank your bottom.”
Maggie laughed. “Hey you gotta get in the spirit of the place.”
“I guess.” She waited. “Soooo…”
“The cops came to the club.”
“Right. I talked to them too.”
“Yeah, sure. But I wasn’t there. I mean, I never talked to ‘em. I just heard about it.”
“Why didn’t they talk to you?”
“The owners asked me to stay home and stay out of it. Nobody mentioned my name because they’ll be in way hot water since…”
“You’re underage?” Lucy interrupted, incredulous.
“Seventeen last month.”
“And you’re working at Club Fetish?”
“I got…listen, this is part of why I called you. Hey look I’m an old seventeen, OK? I got a sister seven years older I look just like her so I’ve been goin’ to bars and shit since I was like fourteen, OK? I ain’t no virgin, honey. I’ve always used her ID, it always got me in the door.
“So anyways I was working on St. Marks’, you know, at the punk store Trash and Vaudeville.”
“So you knew Carole before.”
“She’s the one that got me the job at Fetish. She noticed my tats and the way I dressed at work and thought maybe I’d like it there.”
“Did you? Do you?”
Another pause. “Well, yeah, kinda. I mean I like bein’, you know, dominant over the guys, since my Dad’s such a drunken asshole and he’s always treated me like shit, so I get a feeling like I’m getting back at him. And most of the girls don’t hit too hard, at least not there.”
“What do you mean, at least not there?”
“There are other places.”
“Other places like Fetish?”
“That’s why I called you. There’s this club called Moan. Just one word. Moan. It’s much different that Club Fetish, and…”
“Moan?
Like M-O-A-N?”
“Yeah. It’s pretty hardcore. I mean the people that go there really like to get hurt. Or to hurt people.”
“Sounds creepy.”
“It is. I went there once. It was scary. Made the Fetish look like Sunday School. But that’s why I called you. I think that’s where that guy Christopher went with Carole last night when they left Fetish.”
“What makes you say that?”
“She invited me to go with them.”
“Who, Carole?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you know she’s missing since last night, since they found Wadsworth’s body?”
“I heard that. That’s why I wanted to tell somebody, and you seemed like…a little more sensible than the movie people. And like I said I’m trying not to get tangled up with the cops because they’ll close Fetish in two seconds if they know I work there, and I would be out of a job and in big trouble.”
“Big trouble?”
“If my parents know where I work I’d be screwed, Lucy. Can you imagine?”
“Hey, your brother knows you’re called Dezira. That must tell them something.”
“They all know about Dezira but to them it’s a joke. They think she’s part of my online thing, you know?”
“What about your sixteen tattoos?”
“Eleven. Hey, my mom’s got three tattoos. Everybody’s got tats. They’re like so predictable these days. I’d get ridda half of mine if I could afford it.”
“But this whole BDSM part of your life is secret?”
She hesitated, and then said, “That’s right. And I really need to keep it that way.”
“Understood. Where is this place? Moan. Can I call them, check out a website?”
“No phone, no website, no nothing. They move like every other month. I’ll give you the current address if you promise…I mean promise…you won’t say to anyone where you got the info. And if you do go just tell them you know Carole.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Carole? Nah, but her ma lives here in the neighborhood. Her dad died last year so it’s just her ma now. I haven’t seen her but I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t hanging at home until things blow over.”
“Well if you see her you might tell her things aren’t going to blow over until she talks to the cops, OK?”
“Sure Lucy. Hey, here’s that address.” She whispered it. “Don’t go before midnight, there’s no one there. And don’t worry, no one will hurt you unless you want them to.”
“Jesus Christ, Maggie.”
“I know, I know, I’m a weird girl.” She laughed. “But that’s who I am. Bye Lucy. Oh, by the way, one other thing. Her real name’s Belinskowicz. Carolina Belinskowicz.” She hung up.
“Damn,” Lucy said out loud, closing her phone and staring at the screenplay while her mind raced. “God damn.”
As often happened, while engaged in this peculiar conversation Lucy had been hard at work, problem-solving Conrad’s dilemma, and now, putting aside the immediate questions surrounding the dead boy Christopher Wadsworth and the live girls Carole and Dezira, she jumped into a writing session that ran her into the ground five hours later, at nearly two a.m., by which time she had written six versions of the restaurant scene, four versions of the earlier attic scene where Conrad discovers his daughter’s true identity, and a sketchy major rewrite of the original screenplay’s first meeting of the brothers—or cousins, or friends—after their decades of non-communication. This meeting would have to be traumatic and melodramatic, and now that Conrad knew what he knew, possibly even physically violent. Two old men greeting each other, long lost friends, and before they can even begin to talk things through, they’re fighting over Delia, over Madge, over the past and the unspeakable situation they now find themselves in—fighting in an airport parking lot, or the terminal, or back at the house. They would come to blows, it would be humiliating and hard to watch, and then—what? The way the story was moving in her hands she now considered this fight as possibly the last scene in the film.
Why would they bother staying in touch if they lived thousands of miles apart for decades, especially with Morris guiltily aware of how he had betrayed Conrad? The only thing that would make the connection believable would be making them brothers because they would be connected by blood. That’s the way Paul had originally imagined and written it.
But supposing they were friends instead of brothers? If that was the case, then if Morris down in Florida knew that Delia was his daughter he would have kept the relationship alive, for he would likely be unwilling to allow his own daughter to fall out of his life. He would need to know about her, to keep track of her life, even if from afar, anonymously. That made sense: again, a blood connection.
Lucy was in bed by two-thirty, and woke at nine, time enough to dress and do herself up properly to walk the dog before meeting Manny at Raoul’s. She made it five minutes late, not having read a single word of what she’d written the night before, only certain that her careening, pushing, don’t-look-back-until-you-have-to method of moving the narrative forward had always worked for her before and so she had to assume it would work for her again here and now.
But she was also instinctively intrigued by the death of Wadsworth, and wondered what Manny might have to say about it. Who wouldn’t be intrigued, especially if that “who” was Lucy Ripken, a curious kind of girl? She tied Claud up outside, ran a hand through her hair, and entered Raoul’s. Wan daylight filtered through time-grimed windows. Walls and surfaces remained stained a grayish yellow from the old days, when thirty-seven drunken artists ate dinner here every night, twenty-nine of them chain-smoking and binge-drinking from nine pm to four am. In spite of half a dozen No Smoking years, the odor of stale tobacco faintly lingered beneath the aroma of fresh coffee and fruit. The original bistro vibe had not changed in the three years since Lucy last crossed this threshold: the faded artworks, dusty chalk-scrawled menu, dim globe lights and weary-looking morning shift made her feel right at home.
She had closed this place maybe a hundred times in her first five years in New York.
Now she opened it. The only person in the house other than groggy staff was Manfredo Carapini, looking sharp in a pale green suit, a black shirt, and no tie. He nursed an espresso and a snifter of cognac at a two-top against the wall across from the bar.
“I saw your movie, Lucy Ripken,” he said, standing as she approached. She offered a handshake, but he took both of her hands in his and kissed her left then right cheeks, Euro-style. He smelled of an expensive cologne she didn’t know.
“Hi Manny. What do you mean you saw my movie?”
“Sit down,” he said. “Coffee? Something to eat?” He smiled. “I’m having my breakfast cognac. Care to join me?”
“Cognac? No thanks.” A bedraggled waiter appeared. “Coffee and a croissant with raspberry jam, please,” Lucy said. Manny picked up his snifter and drained it. “Another of these, Pedro,” he said, then added. “I found it on Craig’s List.”
“Found what?”
“A DVD copy of the fabulous X Dames that someone pirated. I couldn’t find it in any video stores or online or anywhere else so I posted a request and it turned out that someone had some copies so I bought one.”
“Cool,” Lucy said. “But what’s that got to do with anything, Manny?”
“Nothing, Chickita. Not a thing. Except that you’re writing—rewriting—a part for me and I wanted to see what you’ve got. And I just thought you might like to know. Might like to know that the person I got it from was Carlotta Ripken, of Portland, Oregon.” He grinned.
“My mom? My mom was selling my movie on Craig’s List? Jesus Christ!”
“She wasn’t selling until I offered to buy, Lucy.”
“That is so weird.” But then she lightened up. It was kind of an amusing notion. The food and drink showed. As she fixed her coffee she asked, “Hey, what did you pay?”
“Well, when I identified myself from the TV sho
w—I bet you didn’t know your mom’s a big fan—and told her I was working with you on a movie she about burst her buttons over the phone she was so proud. Then she gave me a really good deal and said tell that girl to call me.”
“Hey, I talked to her last week. And I had no idea she was cruising Craig’s List.”
“Everybody’s on the web these days, kiddo. You should see Marie-Claire work the room on Facebook. She’s a killer.”
“I can imagine.”
He picked up his snifter and swirled, then took a small sip. “Aaaah, that’s the way to kickstart a day, I tell you, Lucy Ripken. A couple of shots of cognac.” He set it down. “By the way, I liked the X Dames movie although I think the ending was unsatisfactory.”
“Reality can be like that. But we did nail them later, you know.”
“So I heard. And I also heard a lot of the so-called spontaneous dialogue in the movie was written—by you and a partner.”
“That’s right.”
“So why are you having issues with rewriting Paul’s script like we agreed?”
“The X Dames was an entirely different species of writing, Manny, believe me.” She paused. “Regardless of that, while it is true that I was having issues with this rewrite, I think I’ve gotten past them. I did a lot of work last night and, well, here’s some stuff.” She pulled a pile of pages out of her bag and handed it over.
“What do we have here?”
“Several versions of several scenes. I haven’t even looked since I finished last night but that doesn’t matter since this whole thing’s in play anyway. Meanwhile just bear in mind that I’m not married to any of these drafts but please, take a good look and see what you think. I haven’t even showed them to Paul yet but he’s cool with you seeing them first. I tried a couple of different approaches to dealing with you and Delia and then wrote the other scenes so those later scenes would work with the different versions of you two. So why don’t you read through them today, let me know how they work for you?”
Sex and Death: The Movie: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 6) Page 7