He sort of looks like Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil, and I have a moment of grim amusement as I remember Heston’s character trying to get his radio-bugging device working in that film.
Sandovál has two assistants, an older white-haired man, well dressed, who sits quietly and listens without speaking. He might be the senior officer, but I think he might not be talking because his English isn’t very good. And there’s another man, thick-necked and blond, in hiking boots and some kind of faded blue bush-ranger jacket with lots of pockets. He looks American, but he doesn’t talk either, so I can’t tell.
No lawyers have shown up, but Tom King sits in on the interview as moral support, and confirms my story as I tell it.
It goes well enough until I mention that after I found the body I contacted Tom. Sandováls eyebrows go up.
“You didn’t call the police?” he asks.
“I don’t know how to call the police in Mexico,” I said. “I don’t have the emergency number. I thought someone else might know.”
If Sandovál finds this implausible, he doesn’t say so. I finish my story, and Sandovál asks a few follow-up questions, and then he offers his sympathies again and leaves.
Speaking as someone who’s been interrogated by police any number of times, this interview was about as good as they get.
After, I have no trouble sleeping. In the morning, I’m awakened by the assistant director bringing me breakfast. This is not normally part of her job, but she’s offering condolences and also trying to find out if I’m functional and can carry on with the production.
I assure her that I’m okay. I ask her what’s going on, and she tells me the police are still around, taking measurements and interviewing everyone. The news of Loni’s death leaked, of course, and half a dozen paparazzi drones are circling the hotel, while extra police have been deployed to keep intruders off the premises.
In fact, because she speaks Spanish and overheard some of the cops yelling at each other, she knows a lot about the investigation. Apparently the local police bungled everything before the PFM got here.
“They cut out pieces of the drywall where the bullet went through,” she burbles. “Both in Loni’s apartment and in Emeline’s. They put them in evidence bags, but they forgot to label them, and now they don’t know which is which. And so many cops came into Loni’s apartment to have their pictures taken that all the evidence there, like the blood spatter, is useless …” Her eyes grow big as she realizes that Loni’s presumed lover is perhaps not the best recipient of this news. She puts her hands over her mouth.
“Oh gosh, Sean, I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said any of that!”
“They wanted their pictures taken with a corpse?” I demand. I’m sickened.
I can see the whole thing. Cops in uniforms tramping around, posing with the body, the famous scandalous Hollywood star …
Though, on second thought, maybe that’s how Loni would have wanted it.
The assistant director scurries away, but she isn’t the last person to bring me food. Apparently it’s customary to bring food to someone in mourning, even if that person doesn’t need it—after all, I’m the star of the production, and normally I get three catered meals a day, plus healthy snacks—and now my refrigerator’s filling up with fruit bowls, soups, boxes of chocolate, six-packs of yogurt, cakes, bags of nuts, and a gluten-free pizza.
Plus there are lots and lots of flowers, including a perfectly giant bouquet from my agent.
The only person who doesn’t express condolences is Mila Cortés, the beautiful Venezuelan who plays my character’s girlfriend Anna. Mila is a complete prima donna. She’s too good for the resort hotel that’s housing everyone else on the production, and she’s staying on a yacht berthed in Playa del Carmen, north of here. I only see her when we have a scene together, and the rest of the time she ignores me.
Worse than ignores, actually. In fact she’s repulsed by my appearance and is offended to her soul that she has to share the universe with someone as strange-looking as me. I’ve been strange-looking for a long time now, and people with Mila’s attitude stand out from the others quite easily.
Still, most everyone else cares, and despite the ridiculous superabundance of flowers and food, I’m genuinely touched by everyone’s concern. They expect me to be torn with grief, and so powerful is the force of their belief that I find myself genuinely grief-stricken. Sometimes my voice chokes and dies in midsentence. Tears come to my eyes. I’m in awe of my ability to embody the character of a devastated lover.
When one of the sound techs, a really beautiful California blonde named Tracee, offers to help me forget Loni, I tell her I’m too broken up to respond. So we make an appointment for late that night.
The lawyers turn up around midmorning and I have to go through the story again, which depresses me even more.
Around noon the claustrophobia gets to me, so I decide to pay a visit to the director, Hadley. I put on a pair of shades and a stolid expression and go out into the sunlight, and suddenly the air is full of whirring as camera drones zoom in for close-ups.
Being in the tabloids always makes me feel happy and wanted, so it takes some effort for me to don the required attitude of moody bereavement and shuffle along with my hands in my pockets.
I find Hadley talking to Sandovál by the pool. Another Mexican cop is talking to Chip, the man who’s cousin to somebody on the set. There’s a line of people to be interviewed, so obviously this will go on for a while.
People keep walking up to me to offer condolences. The advantage of being out of doors is that I can escape them. I thank them and move on, as if I had somewhere to go.
I end up on the beach, alone on the brilliant white sand staring out at the water. I figure it’ll make a great picture on the cover of the Weekly Dish, or some other such publication.
The ocean is a perfect turquoise blue, with surf breaking over the reef a hundred yards offshore. There are police standing around on the beach, guarding the sand or something, but they’re polite enough not to approach.
I breathe in the iodine scent of the sea.
“Hi,” someone says. “You doin’ okay?”
I turn and see that it’s the blond cop who was present at my interview the night before, the man I thought might be American. He’s still in his blue bush jacket, and he’s wearing Ray-Bans, like Gregory Peck in that movie about some war or other. His voice is a sort of tidewater North Carolina.
“Who are you, anyway?” I ask.
He scans the sky for any drone that might be able to read his lips.
“Special Agent Sellers,” he said. “DEA.”
I blink in deep surprise. “You think Loni got killed in some kind of drug crime?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I’m just tagging along with the PFM. I’m here on another matter.”
A cool warning throbs through my veins. If he’s after drugs, there are plenty of them on the set. And I, for one, could not pass a urine test right now.
“Another matter?” I ask. “What’s that?”
He takes out a handheld and turns it on. The display is washed out in the sunlight, so he says, “Can we move to the shade?” We find some palms and stand under them, where the drones won’t be able to spy on us, and he thumbs through different pictures until he finds the one he wants. He shows it to me.
“Do you know this man?”
I push my shades up onto my forehead and look at the photograph. A feeling of recognition passes through me, and I look closer.
It’s Ossley, the assistant prop guy with the fondness for chemical experiments though in the photo he’s got a shaved head and a goatee. It’s the blurry eyes behind the thick glasses that give him away, that and the rather superior expression.
“What’s his name?” I ask.
“Oliver Ramirez,” Sellers says. “Goes by Ollie.”
I say nothing.
“You look like you recognized him,” Sellers probes.
“
He looks like a barista I know,” I say. “Works in a coffee shop in Sherman Oaks.” I slide my shades down to cover my eyes and look at Sellers with what I hope is an expression of innocence. “I don’t know whether his name is Ollie or not.”
I’m not about to finger someone who could implicate me as a drug user, especially if the drug is more or less legal where I live.
So far as I know, Ossley’s chemical experiments haven’t actually hurt anybody. And for obvious reasons I’m not a big fan of my country’s archaic, punitive drug laws.
I decide to change the subject.
“Do you have any idea about—” I pause, as if overcome by emotion. “About what happened to Loni?”
Sellers looks out to sea. “Nobody really knows anything yet,” he says. “But there’s a theory the whole thing was an accident.”
I don’t have to counterfeit surprise. My jaw drops open of its own accord.
Sellers understands my confusion. “See, the shot came from the water,” he says. He waves a hand out to sea. “The shooter must have been in a boat some distance away, on the other side of the reef, otherwise someone would have seen him. And the police are having a hard time figuring out how the killer managed an uncannily accurate rifle shot from out to sea, in a boat that was bobbing up and down, through a glass door and into a darkened room that would have been damn near impossible to see into. And because nobody can find of a motive, they’re thinking that maybe it was an accidental discharge …”
He falls silent when he sees my reaction.
“That’s wrong,” I say. “That’s not what happened.”
“Yes?” he says, suddenly very interested. “How do you know?”
Because what happens around me aren’t accidents, I’m on the edge of saying. What happens around me is murder.
But I don’t say that because my phone rings right at that instant, and it’s my agent, so I have to pick up.
“Thanks for the flowers,” I say.
“Are things okay?” Bruce asks.
“More or less.”
“The lawyers seemed to think everything was all right.”
Other than Loni’s still being dead, I think.
“I’m glad they think so,” I say. I’m not being very candid, since there’s a DEA agent listening from less than three feet away.
There’s a pause, and then Bruce goes on with the next item on his checklist.
“Have you talked to Loni’s parents?” he asks. “This morning they heard about Loni’s death from the news. I’m sure they’d appreciate a more personal touch.”
“Oh Jesus Christ!” Because normally I’d just have my assistant send a card, you know? But I’m supposed to be Loni’s boyfriend, so now I’m nearly family, and I’ll probably have to spend ages on the phone faking bathos to a couple of strangers.
“I don’t even know their names,” I say.
“Kevin’s texting you all that.” Kevin being Bruce’s assistant. “Are you okay otherwise?”
“I’m holding up,” I say.
My phone gives a chime as the text arrives.
“I’ll call them right away,” I say. Because that will give me an excuse to get away from Special Agent Sellers.
Which I do. I go back to my cabana and make the phone call, which is gruesome and produces anxiety and depression in equal amounts, and then I go looking for Ossley.
Ossley’s room isn’t even in the hotel, it’s on the ground floor of some annex tucked between the main hotel and the highway. In fact I think the annex may be an older, shabbier hotel that the bigger hotel acquired. When I knock, it’s not Ossley who calls from inside the room, but a woman.
“This is Sean,” I say. “Is Ossley in?”
The door opens and I see Emeline Cousteau, the set dresser whose suite was punctured by the bullet. She’s tall and dark-haired, with an open face that reminds me of Karen Allen, except without the freckles. She’s barefoot and wears a fiesta top that leaves her shoulders bare.
“Hi, Sean, come in,” she says. “I’m so sorry about Loni.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
Ossley’s place is small, an ordinary hotel room, and has two beds and a little desk. The drapes are drawn, the room is dark and stuffy, and the air smells of mildew from the shower. Ossley is sitting at the desk working on a computer and drinking from a soda can.
I sit on the bed that hasn’t been used. Ossley tells me how sorry he is about Loni. His eyes are impossible to read behind the thick glasses. I sit on one of the beds.
“There’s a DEA agent here along with the Mexican police,” I say. “They’re looking for a guy named Ollie Ramirez.”
You can’t say my dart doesn’t hit home. Ossley turns spastic in about half a nanosecond. He knocks his keyboard to the floor, his soda can jumps across the desk, and his glasses sag down his nose.
“Peace, brother,” I tell him. “I didn’t rat you out.” Though of course that was no guarantee someone else wouldn’t.
Ossley picks up his keyboard, then puts his head in his hands. “What am I going to do?” he cries, to no one in particular.
Emeline walks over to him and puts hands on her shoulders. She massages his stringy muscles and bends over him to whisper into his ear.
“Don’t worry, baby. You’ll be all right.”
As I watch the two, comprehension strikes me like a sandbag dropped on my chest. I think my heart actually stops beating for a while. I gape for a few seconds as I try to jigsaw my thoughts together, and I raise a hand to point at Ossley.
“They were shooting at you,” I say. “You were in Emeline’s room, and the bullet missed and went through the wall and killed Loni.” And then punched a hole in her door and vanished out to sea.
I remember glass on Loni’s patio when I walked to her door yesterday morning. The glass had blown outward, which would have been a clue as to which direction the bullet was headed, except that all the glass fell out of the door right afterwards and lay in heaps everywhere, and I’d forgotten about all that till now.
Maybe if you looked closely at the bullet hole in the wall, the actual trajectory might have been more clear, but all I remembered were neat little holes. No one was paying much attention to the wall, not with a body lying right there, an obvious target for a seaborne sniper.
Ossley and Emeline stare at me as if I’ve just uncovered the great secret that will send their souls screaming all the way to Hell. Which I have, maybe.
“We were—y’know—together,” Ossley says. “And I lowered my head to, um—and anyway, the bullet went right over my head.”
“We hid for a while,” says Emeline. “And then we ran away.”
I look at Ossley. “What chemical experiments have you been doing,” I say, “to get both the DEA and a sniper after you?”
Ossley flaps a hand at me. “Well,” he said. “You know.”
Somehow I keep a hold on my patience. “No,” I say, “I don’t.”
Emeline looks up at me. “You know,” she said. “Like with the wine.”
I nod. “He’s making a reactor vessel—”
“Reactant,” Ossley corrects.
“You’re going to print drugs,” I tell him.
He shakes his shaggy head. “I just lay down the precursor chemicals,” he says. “They’re like prodrugs in nature—they’ll produce drugs once they’ve finished reacting with the vessel.”
“The vessel,” I say, “which you also print.”
“Yeah.”
“Which drugs?” I ask.
He gives a hapless shrug. “The opiates are easier,” he says. “I mean, they’re all closely related, you just decide how many acetyl groups or whatever you want to tag onto morphine …”
“Oxy?” I ask. “Dilaudid? Heroin?”
“Diacetylmorphine hydrochloride,” Ossley says. “But that’s not …” He shrugs, nods, and concedes the point. “Well yeah, it is heroin, yeah.”
“And how much of this stuff have you made?”
He seems su
rprised by the question. “Um,” he says. “None. My gear isn’t good enough. If you’re aiming at producing drugs, your printer needs to be really precise, and you have to control temperature and humidity and light really well. I’ve never been able to afford a printer that good. And even if I get one, I’ll have to run tons of experiments before I can produce anything like a pharmaceutical-grade product.”
“So why is the DEA … ?”
“I put some stuff on the Internet.”
I nod. “Of course you did,” I snarl. “Because the conventions of social media demand that you announce your growing criminality on an electronic forum searchable by law enforcement. What else could you possibly do?”
He spreads his hands in a helpless gesture. “The narcs showed up. They started talking about ‘criminal conspiracy to distribute narcotics.’ I decided it was time to leave town, so I cashed in the Ramirez identity and created a new one.”
“You had a backup identity just lying around.”
“I printed it. And then I got a job here because I know some people.”
At this point I am beyond surprise, so I just nod. Ossley gives a superior grin. “I named myself after the greatest drug dealer of all time.”
I’m blank. “There’s a famous drug dealer named Ossley?”
“Owsley. Augustus Owsley Stanley. He practically created the Psychedelic Sixties. Made millions of tabs of acid back when it was still legal.”
I rub my forehead. “I really don’t care what your grandparents got up to,” I say. “I’m just trying to figure out what I’m going to do with you.”
Ossley’s alarm is clear even behind his thick glasses. He and Emeline exchange looks.
“You can’t tell the cops,” he says. “I mean, everything I did was just theoretical.”
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