McKensie didn’t seem too disturbed by this laceration. He was eating his lime pie.
“Well,” Edith Howell said into the thick silence, “where did John Meade go? Fletch, you said he was just doing an errand.”
“He is. Just ran up to New York for a minute.”
“New York?” exclaimed Edith. “For a minute? We’re two thousand miles from New York, aren’t we?”
“Just for a minute,” Fletch said. “Doing an errand for Moxie. He’ll be back tonight. John said he’d do anything in the world for Moxie.”
“Mister McKensie,” boomed Mooney in what doubtlessly was meant to be taken as a proper manner. “Mister Peterkin tells me you are about to commence principal photography on a film of William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Everyone at table looked at everyone else.
“O.L.,” Moxie said gently.
“If so,” continued Mooney, now obviously addressing Sy Koller, “I should very much like to be considered for a part, however small…”
Gerry Littleford giggled.
“Not Oberon, of course,” conceded Mooney, “bit too thick in the leg for that these days. But you might consider me for Theseus, you know. I’ve played it before, and I’ve always thought Philostrate a smashing role.”
“Really, O.L. Stop it.”
“Well, daughter, no one else seems to want to have me, these days. Of course, my managers rather ran up the price of my talents these last few years. I wouldn’t pay myself what people have had to pay me. I’m sure all that salary-fee business can be adjusted, for a small role. Mister McKensie—” Frederick Mooney smiled at Sy Koller. “—you’re in luck, as you’ve caught me between engagements, as it were.”
“Goddamn it!” Moxie exploded. “Why don’t you consider yourself retired?” She pushed her chair back from the table. “Superannuated? Shelved? Out to pasture?”
“Moxie?” Fletch said.
She stood up, nearly knocking her chair over. “Why don’t you think of joining mother in the asylum? You put her there. You’ve put yourself there. Why don’t you go?”
Moxie left the dining room.
“Her exits are getting better as the day goes on,” Stella commented. “I can hardly wait to see how dramatically she goes to bed.”
“She didn’t even slam a door that time,” Gerry said.
“That was good.” Sy Koller looked at where she had been sitting. “She created all the effect of a slammed door without slamming a door. All the effect of knocking over her chair without knocking it over.”
“What are you guys talking about?” asked Fletch. “There is no door.”
“There’s always a door,” said Sy Koller, “in your mind.”
“I have embarrassed my daughter,” uttered Frederick Mooney remorsefully. “She resists thinking of me as a bit player. She forgets, or she never knew, all the small things I have had to do… in this business, to keep afloat.”
“Coffee, anyone?” Fletch asked. Lopez had appeared with a pot.
“Global Cable News called again,” Lopez said while pouring out Fletch’s coffee. “A Mister Fennelli. I said I’d give you the message.”
“Thank you.” Fletch smiled at those remaining at table. “At the moment, I don’t think I have anything to report.”
19
After dinner, Fletch found Geoffrey McKensie in the billiard room playing alone.
Fletch chose a cue stick and McKensie triangled the balls.
They played almost through a game without saying anything.
Finally, McKensie said, “Sorry. Fraid I behaved pretty badly at dinner. I ran on like a young lady not invited to the garden party.”
“Not to worry,” Fletch said. “You had some things that needed saying and you said ’em.”
Continuing in the tone of one vexed with himself, McKensie clucked, “What will you Yanks think of us Aussies.”
“Us Yanks will think of you Aussies as lovingly as we always have.” At Fletch’s stroke, the cue ball neatly avoided every other ball on the table.
McKensie sank two and took his third shot.
“Good at sports, too,” Fletch said. “Damn it.” He bounced the cue ball off several, leaving McKensie with a wonderful lay. “Tell me, though—those things you said—were you saying them because you really believe someone in Jumping Cow Productions might really have been gunning for Peterman—or were you just saying them to dump on Koller?”
McKensie took a careful shot and sank two at once.
Fletch hung up his stick.
“I don’t know,” McKensie said. “It’s true—Koller was a good director—back before he sank his integrity in the briney. Nowadays, it doesn’t bother him to shoot a bad script—as long as he gets paid for it. What hurts is that he knows better. It’s also true that Peterman was mucking things up royally. He deserved the cold steel between his ribs.”
Seeing Fletch had quit, McKensie resumed playing by himself and cleaned off the table.
Fletch asked, “Do you think Peterman could have been sabotaging this film on purpose?”
“I can’t think of a reason. Nobody likes to lose money.” McKensie hung up his own cue. “But I’ll tell you, Peterman couldn’t have done more to torpedo that film if he were doin’ it deliberate.”
“Drink?” Fletch asked. “There’s some bad American beer.”
“Brought some scripts with me from home,” McKensie said. “Think I’ll go do some work on ’em. Somethin’ tells me Koller won’t want to continue talkin’ shop with me this night.”
20
Outside in the dark, Edith Howell and Sy Koller were sitting in the comfortable chairs on the cistern sipping large Scotches.
“Do you know,” Edith Howell said to Fletch as he sat down with them, “that Freddy has escaped the premises again?”
“Key West is a good place to go out.”
“He’s like a cat. When you think he’s in he’s out and out in.”
“Gone out for conviviality,” Fletch said. “Do you worry about him?”
“Freddy? Good God, no. He has millions.”
Fletch swallowed what to him was a non sequitur. “Of dollars?”
“Tens of millions. I know that for a fact.”
Fletch shook his head. “Somehow, I thought he was broke. I think Moxie thinks he’s broke.”
“Tens of millions,” repeated Edith Howell. “I know of what I speak. I have friends whose friends are friends of Freddy, if you know what I mean. He has millions all over the world, just lying around.”
“Pity you can’t get your grubby fingers on it all, Edith,” Sy Koller said.
“I’m tryin’, darlin’, I’m tryin’. Did you hear him in there asking the world for a bit part in a movie that’s not even being made? The poor dear. He needs looking after.”
“He’s as crazy as a mosquito in the dressing room of a chorus line,” said Sy Koller. “Gonzo.”
“It’s interesting to know him,” Fletch said.
“That’s because you don’t,” said Edith Howell. “Knowing Freddy is like having a rare disease: shortly the interest pales and what’s left is pain.”
Sy Koller laughed. “Apparently you’re willing to put up with the pain, Edith. For all those millions.”
“For a short while, darling. After all, Freddy’s liver can hardly be made of molybdenum.”
21
“Well, darlings.” Edith Howell picked up her drink and stood up. “If you’re not chatting you might as well be dead, I always say. Or asleep.” Sitting out in the night, she and Sy Koller and Fletch had been silent for two minutes. “So I might as well go to bed.”
After she closed the door to the house behind her, Sy Koller lifted his drink to Fletch and said, “I like my drink, too, you see.”
“You’ve had a hard day,” Fletch said. “Attacked with a knife by one of your actors. Orally attacked by one of your colleagues.”
“Ah, the perils of being a director.” Sy Koller chuckled. �
�Being a director is like being the father of a large family of berserk children who keep slipping in and out of reality. We get paid for hazardous duty, but not enough.”
“I thought I should tell you,” Fletch said slowly, “that the police know that you and Peterman had a fist fight outside a Los Angeles restaurant three years ago.”
“They do? How do you know that?”
“Talked to Chief of Detectives Roz Nachman this afternoon. She called. She accused me of having hijacked all her prime suspects.”
“I’m a prime suspect?” Koller ran his palm over his stubbly chin and cheeks. “I shouldn’t be.”
“No?”
“Why should I put myself out of a job? Now that Peterman’s dead the future of Midsummer Night’s Madness is dubious.”
“You mean you won’t even finish filming it?”
“Well,” Koller snorted. “Peterman was the only one who seemed to believe in the property.”
“Didn’t you believe in it?”
“Not really. Peterman gave me the script and said he wanted it shot exactly as written.”
“You never even saw McKensie’s script?”
“No. Peterman said it was a pile of dung.”
“Do you think it would have been?”
“Probably not. But it was clear to me that McKensie had every reason in the world to sue Peterman, so how could I ask to use his script? It would confuse matters. You don’t know this business, do you?”
“No.”
“Think of having a career where you have to find a whole new job every six months.”
“Finding a job is the hardest job there is.”
“That’s the director’s life. And the actor’s life. And the set designer’s. It brings a certain element of the frantic to this business. And a great deal of hot air.”
“But don’t you get rich and famous after a while? Able to pick and choose?”
“Seldom. You make a pile of money, and you spend a pile and a half. Because you’re so frantic. You blow it on hot air, keeping up the image. The more money you make the more frantic you become, the more you blow it on hot air and the deeper into debt you go, which makes you more frantic.”
In the trees night birds were gossiping.
“Anyway, the police say you were fighting over a woman.”
“Is that what they say? I guess it’s what we said at the time.”
“That you had Peterman down on the sidewalk and were strangling him when you were pulled off.”
“Yeah,” Koller sighed. “It felt good.” Fletch said:
“She must have been one fantastical woman.”
“I wish I’d ever known a woman worth strangling someone over.” Koller lit a cigarette. “Methinks, mine host, you enquire as to why I was strangling Steve Peterman.”
“Just curious,” said Fletch. “Did he stick you with one of his telephone bills?”
Koller took a drink. “Happy to tell you. Because my strangling Steve Peterman three years ago is the best evidence I’ve got that I didn’t stab him yesterday.”
Fletch waited. The tip of Koller’s cigarette glowed brightly.
“I caught him out in a fraud,” Koller said. “I resented it. I hated it. Peterman wasn’t the first to work this scam, and he wasn’t the last. But, Fletcher, this business can be so dirty… sometimes it gets to you. What he was doing was raising money for a film which didn’t exist, and never would. He had gotten ahold of something which looked like a filmscript, a story about some South American patron and his daughter and a priest and a revolutionary—a complete mess. Anybody who knew anything about the business would know it wasn’t a filmscript. It was just a hundred pages of people saying hello and goodbye and making speeches at each other. He had been out peddling this to people who didn’t know better across this broad land—you know, the doctors and the shoemakers, the widows and the orphans, all who dream of making a financial killing on a big movie while having their lives touched with glamor. They’d be invited to the opening in New York. Also the Academy Award ceremony of course. He told the suckers he just wanted start-up money, to be paid back when and if he got the film capitalized.”
“But not to be paid back if he did not get the film capitalized?”
“Of course not. Told them it was going to be filmed in El Salvador. Even had an El Salvadorean S. A. Had no intention of trying to capitalize it. You never heard of this scam?”
“No.”
“I figure he’d raised about a half million dollars, all of which had disappeared down this El Salvadorean hole.” Koller stubbed out his cigarette. “I hated this for two reasons. It’s bad for the business. The next guy who goes out and tries to raise start-up money for a film might be honest. The more of these little cheats there are running around, the harder it is for the honest guy.” Koller drank. “The second reason, of course, was that he was using my name. He had told these people maybe he could get Sy Koller to direct. That we’d had conversations. That we were in negotiations.”
“Not true?”
“I’d never met the son of a bitch. First I’d heard about it was when Sonny Fields told me he’d heard it was going on.” Koller lit another cigarette, his lighter flaring in the dark garden. “So, one night after more to drink than was good for me, I met Peterman in a Los Angeles bar, pulled him out to the sidewalk by his coat collar, proceeded to hit him upside the head. He fell to the sidewalk. I sat on top of him and proceeded to throttle him. It felt real good. His neck was soft. No muscle at all. Wonder I didn’t kill him before nosey people interfered.”
“Why didn’t Peterman press charges?”
“Why didn’t I have him arrested for fraud?”
“I don’t know.”
“We came to an amicable settlement. Peterman said he was just using this scam to raise money for a real film, somewhere down the road. My career wasn’t looking too good. Aforementioned frantic need to gain employment. So…”
“So… ?”
“I agreed that if he ever had a real film to direct, I would direct it. We laid the fight off on a woman.”
“You blackmailed him.”
“We blackmailed each other. It’s the way much of this business works, old son.”
“And what happened to the half a million dollars?”
“It went into Peterman’s pockets. And then into his shoes and his wife’s furs.”
“So Midsummer Nights Madness came along, starring Moxie Mooney, whom Peterman by then controlled, and Gerry Littleford—”
“And Talcott Cross hires Geoffrey McKensie to direct. I called Steve Peterman.”
“Had you seen the script?”
“No. But I had a pretty good idea it wasn’t much good.”
“Why would you want to direct a loser?”
“Well. … In the three intervening years my career had sunk so low I was getting the bends. You understand?”
“How would directing a stinker help your career?”
“It would prove I could get employed. It would also provide me with some much needed money. You know about money?”
“I’m learning.”
“End of story,” said Koller. “As long as Peterman was producing, Koller was directing. Peterman dead: Koller dead. Ergo the one person absolutely guaranteed not to kill Steven Peterman is your’s truly. Maybe it’s a shameful story,” Koller concluded, “but it’s a hell of an alibi.”
“Fletch?” Moxie’s voice came from the upper balcony of the Blue House. “Are you out there?”
“Yo.” He stepped under the balcony.
She said, “If you give me any of that Romeo crap, I’ll spit on your head.”
“If only your fans could hear you now.”
“Go find Freddy for me, will you? I was sort of rough on him.”
“Yes, you were.”
“If I want criticism,” she said irritably, “I’ll ask for it.”
“You’re asking for it.”
22
After a long silence, while Fletch wa
ited, the man’s voice drawled over the phone, “Sorry. Chief Nachman says she can’t come to the phone now.”
“Please,” said Fletch, with as much dignity as he could enlist. “Tell her it’s her earwig calling.”
“Earwig? You mean that little no-see-’um bug?”
“Right.” Alone in the study at the back of The Blue House Fletch smiled. “Earwig.”
There was another long silence before Chief of Detectives Roz Nachman picked up. “Yes, Fletcher?”
“Thank you for answering, Chief. You’re working late.”
“Has one of your house guests become overwhelmed with remorse and confessed to murder?”
“It’s a classier crime than that.”
“I know it is.”
“I have a line of investigation for you, though. Just a suggestion, really.”
“Suggest away.”
“Steve Peterman must have had some kind of a car. A rented car or something. Everyone was up and down that Route 41 so much, between the two beaches.”
“I suppose so.”
“I suggest you check Peterman’s car to see if it’s been in an accident. A hit-and-run accident.”
Nachman did not pause long. “You talking about McKensie’s wife?”
“Just a thought. Wouldn’t take much to check it out.”
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