“What?” She remained calm for a moment, not quite there just yet; she didn’t hear him right, she didn’t believe him, it didn’t make sense.
“That’s when the affair ended. After your mother got pregnant…with you. I never knew. I never knew, or even suspected, but…”
She cut him off as his words sank in, so many blades. “Daddy, why are you telling me this now?” Tears rained from her eyes. “You didn’t need to…you’re my father, you’re the only father I’ve ever…”
“He’s coming here. He wants to see you. He wants—a relationship.”
“But why did you tell him? Why does he have to be in our…in my life, Daddy?”
“I’m sorry, Del. I didn’t know…after your mother died I decided to patch it up with him—let bygones be bygones, as they say. Because when we were young we were very close friends. I guess with your mother gone I felt like I could let myself miss him again. And I did. I missed him. Little did I know…” he struggled with the bitterness in his voice. “Little did I know they had…carried on all those years. So I called him and invited him up for a visit, to meet you, to meet his oldest friend’s wonderful, beautiful daughter, to patch things up, to…” he broke down into tears. “God, Delia, I don’t want to see him, I don’t want you to see him, but he’s known all along, all these years, that you were his, and…”
“I won’t be here. I’m not his, and I don’t want to see him. I don’t want anything to do with him. Daddy,” she said defiantly, “I’ll call him myself and tell him not to come. I don’t care if he claims he’s my father, because you’re my father, there’s no way someone else can be my dad,” she cried, and Conrad slipped around the table and sat by her and put his arm around her shoulders and held her close, a father comforting a daughter as they are both overwhelmed by this sudden, irrevocable change in their world.
Conrad held her, drawing strength. “He’s coming tomorrow. We have to…I have to get this over with, Delia. You can…you’ll have to see how you feel, what you want to say to him, what kind of relationship you want to have, that’s your choice and your decision, but I need to look him in the eye and tell him I know everything.”
“He doesn’t know you know?”
“I just found the letters today, Delia. I didn’t have any idea. Now he thinks I think he wants to be your godfather. And now I know the real reason he wanted to come. ” He looked at her. “Because of you.”
“I want to see them.”
“The letters? I don’t think so, I think that’s…”
She stood abruptly. “Let’s go, Dad.”
He threw money down and they left the restaurant, arms encircling one another, his above, hers below. “I threw them away,” he said as they headed down the street. “I didn’t want to have them in my house.” He took on a noble, suffering air, and they pulled slightly apart. He shot her a look, and his face changed.
Something has just struck him—something about what he feels for her.
“Cut,” shouted Paul, and everybody stopped. “That was…truly fine work!” he said to Manny and Carole, both breathing heavily as they paused, resting, on the sidewalk.
“Good job,” Lucy said. “Wow.”
Manny smiled. “I think that went pretty damned well if I don’t say so myself. Good words, Lucy Ripken.” He bowed to Carole, slightly mocking. “Excellent work, sweetheart.” Then he looked at Lucy again. “But now comes the hard part, eh?”
She laughed. “You bet, Manfredo.” You got that right, wiseguy, she thought. Yeah, I’d say so. From here straight to bed with your daughter. Yes. I would say the next bit might be the very definition of the hard part.
After a lunch break, they gathered to make a plan. “Hey, we’re on a roll, and its already written,” Manny said. “Let’s do this today.”
“Carole?” Paul said. She gave him a look, and shrugged.
“Whatever. Sure.”
“OK, people,” Paul said to the gathered cast and crew. “We’re going to the apartment location. We’re shooting a newly-added scene. You know the one with Conrad and Delia in her apartment? The people I need, you know who you are. The rest of you are done for the day. It’s Friday so see you next week. I’ll post next week’s shooting schedule on the website by Sunday afternoon.”
Fifteen years back Paul and Angwine, his first wife, had homesteaded a one-bedroom apartment in a burned-out, junkie-filled building on 8th Street between Avenues C and D. Now the block had gotten respectable, with kids playing , laundry swaying, and potted plants with geraniums brightening up the fire escapes. The building had twenty-four apartments, all occupied. Paul’s was on the third floor.
This served as Carole’s home in the movie. Conrad’s been staying with her part of the time since his wife died, because their house in Queens seemed so empty without her. Because he needs his daughter now, with his wife dead.
Delia is in the shower, murmuring to herself a Beatles song her mother used to sing to her when she was a baby. “Baby you can drive my car, yes I’m gonna be a star, baby you can drive my car, and maybe I’ll love you. Beep beep mm beep beep yeah,” Delia sang, then turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. She grabbed a towel as she heard the door in the other room. “Dad. Conrad…Dad, that you?” she called out.
“Hey Sweetpea, yes it’s me. I got your coffee and…”
“Hey Dad,” she said. “Do you remember when mom used to sing me that Beatles song?”
“Drive My Car? Yes,” he said. He paused in the doorway to the bedroom. She stood opposite him, in the doorway between bedroom and bathroom, wrapped in a towel, her long blonde hair wet and falling down round her shoulders. Her unmade bed, clothes strewn across it, occupied the space between them. “I loved that song. That whole album—what was it, Revolver, or Rubber Soul? Both of them were amazing records.”
Her voice tremulous and sweet, she sang, “I told that girl I could start right away, she said listen babe, I got somethin’ to say, I got no car and it’s breakin’ my heart, but I found a driver, and that’s a start…”
They stared at each other across the room. Conrad’s eyes filled with tears. “I miss your mother, Delia. Even though she did what she did, I miss her every day.”
“I know, Dad…Conrad.” They moved simultaneously to the middle of the room, and hugged at the foot of the bed.
Paul shot this from behind Delia. The towel falls away from her body as they hug. The last image is Conrad’s hand on her bare back. Her barely audible voice saying, “Dad, what are you…Daddy, don’t…”
“Cut,” Paul said, and nothing else. He left the room. “I’m getting dressed,” Carole said, grabbing her clothes from behind the bed.
“How’d it go?” Lucy asked Paul as he came into the living room with Chong.
“Fine,” he said. “I guess.”
“Yeah. Well, Mr. Carapini got what he wanted, right?”
“Yes he did,” Paul said. “Nice work Lucy, keeping it low key like that. We didn’t even have to watch them kiss, but now everybody knows Mr. Stud got his girl. Ugh. OK people,” he looked at his watch. “We’re done here.” The crew began filing out. “Hey Lucy, before you go…” Manny and Carole came out of the bedroom.
“Nice work, guys,” Paul said.
“That wasn’t so hard now, was it, Lucy?” Manny said.
“Why don’t you ask Carole?” Lucy said. “She’s the one whose love you need, Mister.”
“Hey, what’s done is done,” Paul said. “Time to move on.”
“Hey baby, you want to share a taxi?” Manny said to Carole.
“I don’t think so…Daddy,” she said snarkily.
Manny gave her the eye. Someone knocked on the door. “What?” said Paul, exasperated. “Now what?”
“Open up, please, it’s the police.”
“Oh shit,” said Carole.
“No shit,” said Lucy.
Halloran stepped into the room in his cheap suit, his red hair slicked down. Panting heavily, he looked lik
e a heart attack about to happen. “I thought I’d find you here,” he said. “That website of yours is very useful, Wittgenstein. Hello, Lucy Ripken,” he added. “Nice to see you here. You too, Carapini. Love your work on the gangster show.”
“Thanks,” Manny said.
“I heard from one of your guys that you’re done for the day so I thought I’d let myself in. You all know why I’m here so I’ll skip the bullshit. Ms. Carole Wainwright, aka Carolina Belinskowicz, your presence is required downtown for a discussion of the recent death of Mr. Christopher Wadsworth. So if you would just come with me we can…”
“Hey, she was with me when Wadsworth died,” Manny said.
“Nobody said she wasn’t,” Halloran answered. “But we need to hear it from her. So butt out, Carapini. This ain’t TV and you ain’t a gangster with a high-priced lawyer. Ms. Wainwright?” He approached her.
She shrugged laconically. “Sure. I’ll go with you. I got nothin’ to hide.” She grabbed her bag. “I’ll see you guys next week.”
“Check the site for time and place, Carole,” Paul said. “And thanks for the good work.”
Halloran left with Carole.
“She’ll be all right,” Manny said. “She’s one tough broad.”
“So she was with you, huh?” Paul asked. “That night I mean? After…”
Lucy cut in. “After your session at Fetish she went with Wadsworth to another place. After that she went with him to his house in Tribeca. She said she passed out there and when she woke up she was alone. She went to Manny’s, Manny sent her to Jack’s, end of story.” Lucy left out the other guy in the story. She planned on seeing him tonight.
“Hm,” said Paul. Lucy thought he looked a little nervous. “So listen, Luce, can we meet tomorrow, go over this other stuff? I’ve got some questions.”
“Sure, Paulie. What time?”
“I’ll call you in the morning.”
“Not too early, please.”
“I thought you never slept.”
“I don’t, but I might. You never know.”
“How about we skip the wake-up call and just do Zola at noon? They do Saturday breakfast.”
“Fine. See you then. Mañana, Manny,” she added with a wave.
He waved back. “See ya kid. And thanks for the good words, as always.”
“My pleasure, Mr. Carapini.” She slipped out the door, and on the way home wondered why it was she had resisted writing that scene. It had played OK, if kind of unreal.
Actually it had seemed completely unbelievable to her, and to Paul as well, it appeared—but maybe in the context of the movie and whatever else she and Paul could come up with to develop that relationship, it would work. Or Paul would watch it on a monitor tonight, and decide they had to try again, some other way. She figured that’s what they’d be talking about tomorrow.
CHAPTER EIGHT
GAMES PEOPLE PLAY
Revenge. That had to be Conrad’s motivation, pure and simple. He wanted revenge for all that Morris had done to him. Screwing his wife then, stealing his daughter now, and stealing with her his happiness, his purposefulness, his raison d’etre.
Would he be capable of having sex with his own erstwhile daughter to exact this ugly vengeance? Lucy had thought not, until now. Now, unfortunately, she knew the players all too well, and was having trouble separating them from their characters—and from their creator. Once upon a time, a few days back, before she’d seen the insides of two too many specialty nightclubs, she had thought her friend Paul to be a paragon of cool, and thus possessed of the inherent ethical wisdom that came with that cool. She had thought that Paul was a guy who would never create an old school New Yorker like Conrad Platznik as a character with a vengeful streak big enough to encompass this kind of transgressively creepy behavior. He would have figured out a way to forgive, while not ever forgetting. That other Paul, who didn’t get his butt spanked in public, who was not a suspect in a sort of murder investigation, would never have had Conrad screwing around with his own daughter, even if he found out she wasn’t “really” his daughter.
But what else made sense? The “love” they shared in the story up to the point of Conrad’s discovery of the letters was not the kind of love that included sex, under any circumstances except a story about incest which this emphatically was not. Except that Paul’s story had set up this unique situation and Manny had elaborated upon it, and in doing so turned it incestuously upon itself. Did it now furnish a motive so powerful as to overwhelm whatever webs of constraint 25 years of history had woven into them as father and daughter? Could Conrad’s reading of these letters create such an implacable desire for revenge? Yes—but at the same time this seemed so obvious, even out of character, that Lucy was sure she had missed something plain to see, something other than Manny’s ego and Paul’s apparent willingness to capitulate to that ego. This was what lay at the heart of her problem—understanding Conrad’s motives.
She pushed back from the desk, sick of the damned thing. Sick of trying to figure out Conrad, sick of Manny’s snide mug possessing her brain, along with Carole and her dead barking dog, and Paul in his black leather thong, red buttocks glowing in the dark.
Well, soon it would all sort itself out, she sensed as she dressed, slowly but carelessly, preoccupied with the current screenplay struggle, and also with more lighthearted thoughts of her friend Mickey, whom she hadn’t seen in over a year. Mickey had volunteered over the phone to hit the Downtowner with her, as she tracked down the elusive other character: the guy who played a possibly major role in the semi-parallel real life drama swirling around the movie and its makers. His name was Mark Kristalli, aka the Dark Krystal. “Sounds like a truly silly character,” Mickey said, upon hearing the story behind the Dark Krystal dude. “At least judging by his name.”
“Well don’t forget he might have killed my producer,” Lucy said.
“Yeah, and your star might have killed your producer as well,” Mickey said. “And your director might have killer your producer. Hey, I might have killed your producer if he’d starting licking my shoes while wearing black velvet diapers. Damn, Lucy, you have a way of stepping into the weirdest shit like no one I’ve ever known. And don’t tell me it’s because you’re a curious kind of girl, puh-leeeeze. I’ve heard that line too many times. I’m a curious girl too and I haven’t ever been near a murder investigation, excepting the ones you’ve dragged me in to.”
“Well here’s your chance for another,” Lucy said.
“I’ll see you at Zola at eleven,” Mickey said. “This is way cool. I hardly ever get a chance to show what a kick-ass poker player I am.”
Zola on a Friday pushing midnight turned out to be a bad idea, as swarms of 25-year olds so important as to render the rest of the universe superfluous had occupied the bar like an invading army, equipped with beauty, cash, confidence, and cellphone weaponry with which they busily captured, texted and yakked at each other and other hordes parked in other bars in the relevant neighborhoods. So Lucy and Mickey skipped the preliminary cocktail and chat. Instead, as soon as Mickey emerged from a cab and appeared on the sidewalk outside, Lucy, squeezed in at the bar feeling like at old-timer at 34, jumped up and cut her off at the door. “Let’s beat it,” she said. “It’s hellish busy in here. God you look incredible, Mick!” She did. Last Lucy had heard Mickey had been on a serious diet, but she hadn’t seen the results ‘til now. Mickey had stuck with it this time: the formerly thick-waisted, wide-bottomed girl was svelte in black jeans and a low-cut red shirt, her graying hair gone back to black, her face made up lightly to perfection, her formerly yellow teeth white as fresh snow from some unspeakable treatment or other.
“Thanks, Luce,” she said as they scrambled into a cab after a trio of 23-year old girls with nine yards of legs between them tumbled out the door in a giddy tangle of limbs and laughs. “It has not been fun, but it’s been four months now since I hit 120. I’ve stayed there.”
“How’s the kid?”
; “You mean ‘Dada?’” Mickey’s 22-year old son and his 19-year old girlfriend had a two year old boy. The three of them lived with Mickey in a huge apartment on Roosevelt Island. “They’re all good. I just wish they’d get the hell out of my place,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to bring a man home for a sexy time, and have to introduce him to my shit-stained and squalling grandson.”
“We’re going to the Downtowner,” Lucy said to the cabbie. “It’s at the bottom of Greenwich Street, almost at Battery.” She turned back to Mickey. “Yeah, I imagine that would tend to put a damper on romance. You’ve got to be the last of the 40-year-old grandmothers, Mick. Nobody has kids at 18 any more.”
“Nobody but me and my daughter-in-law,” Mickey responded drily. “But the kid is pretty damn cute, I must say. So tell me how we are going to crack this secret card game,” she went on. “I wore this boob-exposing blouse just for the game, you realize,” she said, cupping her breasts in her hands. “Nothing like a good pair to distract the other players from tracking down my tell.”
“You have a tell?”
“People have said I pull my left earlobe when I’m bluffing. I know about it but sometimes I forget and do it unconsciously.”
“How about I kick you under the table when you do it?”
“How about you get me in the door and let me run the table?”
Getting her in the door proved easy. Once they went into the Downtowner and found the appropriate-looking guy, the one standing around looking important, Lucy said she was a friend of Chris Wadsworth’s.
“You know Wadsworth?” he said, surprised.
“I did, yeah,” Lucy said.
“So you know he’s…”
“Dead? Yeah,” she said. “A sad story, huh?”
“Heartbreaker,” he said coolly. “You play you pay that’s what they say. So you chicks got serious money? This ain’t no dollar ante bullshit here.” Lucy showed him five grand in hundreds she’d brought along, half the fast-disappearing advance Paul had handed over. The guy disappeared for two minutes, then came back and beckoned them over. “The door past the women’s room. Knock twice, wait, knock twice again, then wait and knock once.”
Sex and Death: The Movie: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 6) Page 11