“Is that your film?” Wadsworth said to Paul, cautiously hoping for a simple solution to what he now sensed might be a complicated problem. “Do you want us to watch your film, Mr. Wittgenstein? Is that what this is about?”
“No, this is not my film,” Paul said. “This is another film which I had nothing to do with but which has come into my possession. This is a short film of your son in what I can only describe as an extremely compromising, even horrifying, situation. I do not want to show you this film because he was your son and it will break your hearts, and I do not want anyone else to have to see it, but if you refuse to let me finish my movie under the terms which we very generously proposed to you —I will not only show this movie to you but I will put it on YouTube and Facebook and Fox News and ABC, NBC, CBS, and bloody Al-Jazeera as well.”
“Are you blackmailing my clients, Mr. Wittgenstein?” Chandler asked, quietly outraged.
“I want to finish my movie,” Paul responded.
“I asked you a question, Mr. Wittgenstein,” Chandler insisted, still trying to play this straight, pretending that he hadn’t completely fucked up by not pushing his clients to shut the hell up before it even got this far. But Lucy could see a crack in the armor of his self-esteem.
“Do you want me to show this here, right now?” Paul said. “Help you make a decision?”
“What do you…what are you saying?” Mrs. Wadsworth, the grand dame reduced to bewildered suburban housewife. “This is a film about…about Christopher?”
“It is a film of Christopher,” Paul said. “Unfortunately, it is a film in which…well, I’m not sure you want to see it, Mrs. Wadsworth.”
“Just play the goddamned movie, Wittgenstein,” Albert Wadsworth snarled, his anger and impatience boiling over. How dare these punks try to blackmail him!
“Is that what you want?” Paul said to Chandler.
“Do what he says,” Chandler said. “It’s his decision.”
“I’m out of here,” Carole said, standing. “I don’t want to watch this.” She left the room.
“Anyone else want to leave?” Weiss said.
“This is a very unpleasant little movie,” Paul said. “And I don’t have to…”
“Just play the goddamned thing, for Christ’s sake,” Wadsworth said. He was incapable of imagining what he was about to see.
“Fine,” Paul said. He slipped the disk into a large screen laptop and pushed it into position so everyone could see it. It took a minute, and then got going.
The lighting was uneven and the sound chopped to pieces by ambient racket of some sort, but there it was, in glorious digital color: the clearly stoned, drunk, and deranged Christopher Wadsworth; his noose, his chair, his strip dance that revealed his long, well-built, and naked-but-for-socks body, his enormous, flapping, throbbing erection, the whole sick show. For some bizarre reason Lucy couldn’t fathom, neither of the parents asked Paul to stop it, turn it off, end their torture. They watched, silent and stoic, abasing themselves with every passing second as minute after minute of Christopher in grotesque action rolled by, until it ended, with his last jerking moments on the end of a rope followed by a hiccup, followed up Christopher on the floor, looking quite dead. And then, twenty-one minutes and twenty-three seconds after it began, the movie abruptly ended.
In the impossibly heavy silence that followed, a silence soon broken by the sobs of Mrs. Wadsworth, Lucy worked past her disgust and pity, and back into her curious mode. She wondered what happened to the rest of the movie, to the part where Carole claimed she tried to rescue him. And for that matter what happened to the sound, which had gone so bad that Carole’s voice was completely unrecognizable. Carole, who’d left the building before they ran the clip, evidently had edited herself entirely out of the sordid little narrative.
Paul got what he wanted: a quarter of a million dollars to finish his movie and whatever else. The Wadsworths got a promise that they’d get half their son’s last chunk of unaccounted-for money back, and a written agreement, prosecutable if ever violated, that the film they’d just seen would never, ever, under any circumstances be shown anywhere at any time to anyone ever again. Leaving the room without ever even looking at any of their adversaries—and Lucy knew as they left that not she, nor Paul, nor Weiss would ever see them again—the Wadsworths appeared to have aged about ten years in an hour.
“You know,” Paul said later, as he and Lucy sat at the bar at One Fifth, drinking straight shots of vodka to calm down afterwards. “If that woman hadn’t made the crack about the silly movie about a bunch of old Jews, I might have been a little more willing to…you know, not hit them so hard.”
“But she did. And they didn’t…you’d already offered them an out, Paul. Hey, that was a irredeemably nasty piece of footage, but you know what, they needed to see it. They needed some kind of reality check. It’s like they’re trying to reclaim their son, whom they had obviously lost touch with, by claiming his money. Having them see that was definitely cruel, but what else could you do?”
“I could have sweet-talked a little better, talked them into watching my movie and made them see what a great piece of work it was, and then…”
“What, they’d write you a check? To finance a movie about a bunch of silly old Lower East Side Jews committing rape, incest and other fun stuff? Dream on, Paulie,” Lucy said, and drank some vodka. “Damn, that was some weird shit your guy Christopher was into. I mean I thought he was a lunatic when he started licking my shoes that night, but that was just…you know, fun and games.”
“I am so over that Fetish scene, Luce,” said Paul. “I don’t give a shit what Grace has to say about it, I’m just not going there anymore.”
“Paulie, tell me something,” Lucy said. “About that night. Did you…were you there?”
“Where?”
“At Wadsworth’s? Did you shoot that footage and help Carole make up that story?”
He looked at her, guileless. “Now why would you think a thing like that, Lucy?”
She shrugged. “The night I saw your wife spank your butt in public, all bets went off about your sweet little not-very-private life, Paulie my boy,” she said. “Besides, you did want the money, right? I mean for more than the movie. You said it yourself. Rio and all that.”
“Christopher killed himself, Lucy. You saw it onscreen, for God’s sake.”
“Yeah, I know. You’re right. But what I didn’t see was Carole, trying to get him down like she said. I didn’t see her at all. Funny thing.” She checked her watch. “Hey, I gotta go feed and walk my dog. I’ll see you…”
“Tomorrow, nine a.m., apartment location. Nick to the rescue. Be ready for on the spot rewrite.”
“No prob. Ciao, Paul,” she said, and strolled out into the evening, very much aware that he had not actually answered her question.
The third meeting took place later that cinematic night, as envisioned the next morning in Delia’s apartment with the shades drawn, day for night.
Morris has gone on his mission, to find, confront, and beat to within an inch of his miserable old life his once-upon-a-time best friend, Conrad. Or perhaps he will simply use words to attain the same result, both he and Conrad being rather ancient for hand-to-hand combat, and neither at a loss for words when they were needed. He has left Delia alone because she asked; she also asked him to see Nick, to let him know she couldn’t come by. She really didn’t know what Morris and Conrad should say or do to one another.
Now, with Morris, her newly-discovered father, gone, Delia is alone again, with her broken heart, violated body, confused spirit. In the whirl of her emotions she instinctively turns to the one person in the world she’s always been able to trust absolutely. Her father, Conrad. But he is no longer hers to trust or to love. She shudders, shies away from the thought of him, and turns elsewhere, but where? Her mother, always difficult, is gone. This new man, Morris, is who he is—he wants to be her father, he is her father, she accepts this—but she doesn’t know him.
Lucy had been writing these back stories in a separate document throughout her screenwriting sessions, just to keep track of who was supposed to be feeling and doing what behind the often spare, undramatic dialogue Paul asked of her. Now, with this, she thought maybe she’d gone a little too far into an overwrought exploration of Feelings with a capital F. All she had to do was write a few bits of stage direction which Paul would ignore anyway, and give the actors their straightforward, uncomplicated lines, which they would change as they felt necessary, carried away in the improvisatory spirit of whatever dramatic moment had them. Michael Cornell and Carole Wainwright had already done a few scenes together, and they’d hit it off famously, half-making it up along the way.
Lucy wondered, now that Wadsworth was done-for and Manny seemingly losing interest in the girl due to assorted complications, how soon might these two start doing the offscreen nasty; or in their case the sweetie, since their relationship onscreen and off so far had been nothing but bon bons.
Everybody was ready.
Nick knocked lightly, and Delia, waiting, opened the door instantly. “Oh Nicky,” she said, and burst into tears. Not exactly what she’d had in mind. She or Lucy. Delia hadn’t had anything in mind but pain and need, which she discovered as soon as she saw him. Lucy had in mind more restraint, but whatever, these were actors, they had to do what they felt.
“Del, Del honey, I know, I know,” he said, holding her and stroking her hair. “What a crazy day. What an absolutely insane day.” After a moment of holding her, he stood back to look into her face; he realized she was wearing these strange layers of clothes, as if she dressed herself while asleep in a cold, dark place.
“Did you see…Morris? Did he come by the restaurant?”
Nick nodded. “Yeah. He said he was your real father, and…”
She cried softly, “Yes, that’s right. But…I think he was after Conrad. I think he was going to…I don’t know. Do something bad. Violent. But they’re both so old. They were both…oh, God, Nicky,” she steeled herself, suddenly determined. An image—a vision!—of her lovely, unhappy mother had come to her. Her mother had lived a lie her whole life. These same two men had forced another lie upon her, Delia. God damn the both of them! She thought. I don’t need to do this. I don’t need to be like her, to hide behind a lie, and punish myself forever. There is no shame in what happened to me. “Conrad was here, and he…after we talked about what happened back when…when I was…when my mother was pregnant and I was born…”
“What happened, Delia?” Nick asked, as they sat down on the sofa. He kept his hand on her, needing to touch her, sensing that she needed his touch, to reassure herself, to not be afraid.
“Conrad forced himself on me, Nick. He…once he knew he was not my father he wanted to…I don’t even think it was about me anymore,” she said, tears streaming but her mind clear, feeling itself liberated as the words came out, the words that had to be spoken. “It was about him wanting to get back at Morris for…for what he’d done with my mother, and then, I was, God, I don’t know why he thought it would…it was like he HATED me for that moment, because I was…even though I was…we’d spent our whole lives together as father and daughter he suddenly didn’t know me, and he was able to…” she stopped. “Turn me into someone he could…do that to.”
He looked at her, and finally as her halting words sank in did he realize what she had just told him. “Delia, do you mean to say your fath…Conrad…assaulted you…sexually?”
“Yes, Nicky, that’s what I mean! That’s what he did, don’t you understand? He raped me! And he is not my father!”
“Oh my God, that…bastard,” Nick said. “No wonder that other guy…Morris…was so crazy when he came in...Oh, Delia. You told him too, didn’t you?”
“I did.” She spoke softly. “But only because I was still…frightened. I didn’t know what to…who to turn to, and when he came over I was all alone and he said he was my father, and…I don’t know.” She became resolute again. “I don’t want him to hurt Conrad. I don’t need that. I want them both to just go away. I don’t want either of them in my life, Nicky. I can’t ever see Conrad again, not after what he did, and this Morris…he may be my father but I don’t know him and I don’t think I want to know him, not after what happened today.”
“He didn’t do anything wrong, Del,” Nick said.
“Other than write me out of his life for 25 years,” she said.
“Isn’t that what your mother wanted?”
“My mother was an unhappy woman, Nick. I don’t want to learn any more from her. But aside from that, if he had really cared, he could have, you know, found a way to…let me know. To at least try to connect us together somehow. So that today never would have happened…at least not the way it did.”
He put an arm around her shoulders. “Let’s go get a glass of wine,” he said. “Or maybe six. A bottle anyways. We don’t need to go to One Twenty One. We’ll go someplace where no one knows you. We can talk some more. OK?”
“Sure, Nick,” she said, then looked down at her weird bag lady ensemble. “But I think I’d better change my clothes.” She smiled wanly. “I look like a street freak.”
“I kinda like the look, Del,” he said, smiling. “Walk out there you’ll start a trend.”
“Cut,” said Paul. Everybody relaxed.
“Do you think it ends OK?” Lucy asked, because she didn’t.
“Yeah,” Paul said. “They can pick it up on the street as they head for wherever they go.”
“Where should they go?” Lucy said. “You have anything in mind?” Her phone rang. “Lucy here,” she said, not even looking at the caller ID.
“Ripken,” he said.
“Harry!” Lucy cried out, instantly, impossibly happy to hear his voice. “I’m so glad you called back. Where are you?”
“A very dark corner of Haiti, Luce,” he said. “Not your vacation destination of choice.”
“Harry, what are you doing in…”
“The usual,” he said. “Which means as you know that I can’t really tell you. But I can tell you this: I will be back in New York very soon and I would love to see you, Lucy. It has been too long.”
“So you and Katya are…”
“That woman loved shopping far more than me, Lucy.”
“She traded in her drug habit for a credit card, I would say.”
“Exactly. So how’s your project coming along? I heard—from Mickey—you were working on a movie with Paul W. That true? If it is I am so jealous. I’d love to write a screenplay one of these days. Especially one that someone actually might make into a movie, or at least option for a sum in the high six figures. Dream on, eh?”
“Hey, it has been interesting, even if I am still mired in the low five figures. But we’re in the thick of it here as we speak. I gotta go. Call me soon as you get into town.”
“Will do Luce. Ciao.” He was gone.
“Told you he’d call, Luce,” Paul said, happy to see her big, uncomplicated smile, the one she hadn’t had on her face in the lo
ngest time.
“Yeah well I called first, didn’t I?” Lucy said, still smiling.
“Told you to, didn’t I?” Paul said again.
“Yeah. Hey, he’s in Haiti of all the weird places. What do you suppose he’s up to there?”
“God, the possibilities are many, and all of them scary, Luce.”
“Hey, not to break up your little chitter chatter but are we done for the day or what?” Carole said.
“What do you think?” Paul said. Ever the egalitarian director, he said, “Hey crew,” to the gang, still busy breaking gear down and packing it up. “Everybody up for shooting another scene—the street and into another bar—today, or should we wait another day and give everything a chance to fall further apart?”
Taking his cue, Michael Cornell looked at his watch ostentatiously and said, “I’ve got an audition for a soap this afternoon, PW. Steady work, know what I mean? I thought we were just doing this bit here and that was it.”
“Sounds like a good reason to bail for the day,” Paul said. “I’ve got some business to take care of anyways,” he added, with a look at Lucy. “See you all at nine tomorrow, Second and Second.”
“You’re shooting there?” Lucy said.
“Yeah, they like me there. Said I didn’t have to pay long as we finished by noon.”
“What about the fight, or argument, or whatever scene between Manny and Jack? That seemed like it might be a good spot for that.”
“Let’s go downstairs, let them finish up here,” Paul said quietly to Lucy. They did, and stood on the sidewalk out front of the building. Lucy marveled, briefly, at the presence of high-priced cars—a BMW and a Jaguar—parked in front of the building. A few years back the only people driving cars like these were higher tier dope dealers passing through to deliver their wholesale wares to their street workers, and lower-tier dope buyers looking for said street workers to buy their favorite vice from. Now the Wallstreeters were taking over. Another and far more prosperous, if somewhat soulless, East Village, was rising from the heroin-laced ashes of the one she knew. “That bar is a good location for the fight, you’re right. It’s one of the last ones around that hasn’t been over-redesigned. I might even stage the fight as part of the same scene, you know, one of them comes in and finds Nick and Delia there talking, the other finds him, we take it from there. N and D watch and try to intervene, to no avail. We might be able to…”
Sex and Death: The Movie: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 6) Page 17