by Jeff Lindsay
“It’s not that complicated,” I said.
Jackie smiled, a little sadly, and said, “It is. It always is.”
“I know I’m not a Greek arms dealer,” I said. “But—”
She looked startled. “Oh!” she said. “Oh, no, it isn’t that.” She reached across the remnants of breakfast and took my hand. “I already have more money than I can spend,” she said. “And if this show runs long enough to go into syndication, that’s my F.U. money.”
“Your what?”
She smiled. “F.U. money. Enough money to say, “Fuck you” to anybody or anything I don’t like, and not have to worry about the consequences.” She squeezed my hand, and then put it down. “Anyway, that’s not the problem.”
“What is the problem?” I said.
She sighed again, very deeply, and turned away to face the water. I looked at her profile. It was a very good profile, even though she was spoiling it a little with another frown, thinking her deep and unhappy thoughts about … what? Surely not me?
“I was selfish,” she said at last. “And that got Kathy killed.”
“Jackie, that’s—”
“No, let me say this,” she said. Her frown deepened. “So many people are just totally focused only on themselves, what they want, that they don’t think about how it affects anybody else. Especially in my business.”
“Not just your business,” I said, thinking that it sounded like a good description of normal life.
“I’ve always hated that,” she said. “I try to …” She waved a hand at the water. “There’s this sense of … empowerment … that goes with being famous. And I’ve seen how it turns good people into … what …”
“Assholes?” I suggested, thinking of Robert.
“Uh-huh, okay,” she said, still looking out over the Bay. “I don’t want that.” She turned back to face me, looking very serious. “I don’t want to be that person.”
“I don’t think you are,” I said.
“I will be,” she said, “if I try to take you away from your family.”
I looked at Jackie, and her deep violet eyes, set in that perfect, smooth, lightly freckled face, and for the first time it hit me that we were talking about exactly that: Jackie taking me away from my family. Dexter leaving Rita and the kids to gallop away into a mojito-soaked sunset and a life of top-shelf bliss. Jackie and Dexter, world without end—or at the very least, world without an end for a few more weeks.
I wanted that; I’d had a tiny taste of Jackie’s world, and of Jackie, and I liked it. I liked everything about it: the swirl of the adoring crowd everywhere we went, the gratifying buzz of worship from everyone who saw us, the room service and limousines and phone interviews and the feeling of being so very important that every burp and hiccup of our life was significant—I liked it. I liked the feeling of being with Jackie, in her world—and in her bed. And I liked her. I wanted more of it, all of it.
And I thought about what that meant: to leave my familiar workaday grind of crawling through violent traffic twice every day in an aging, battered little car, and slogging through the tired jokes and mindless routines of my job, knee-deep in carnage and callousness. And for what? Just to bring home a far-too-meager paycheck, which vanished immediately into the continual, greedy vacuum of family life, with its mortgages and braces and new shoes and groceries. And the endless, weary grind of dealing with kids and their constant problems, always flung at you in the same self-involved, demanding whine; and the every-morning shattering clatter of finding socks and homework and the other shoe as they got ready for school, followed by more shouting and fighting and doors slamming—and then a virtually identical performance every night at bedtime; the diapers and arguments and new jeans and teacher conferences, and high-pitched fighting every earsplitting step of the way. And I thought about Rita, with her perpetually fractured sentences and eternal fussing about absolutely everything, and the lines settling into her face as she hurtled into an old age that shouldn’t have come for another ten years at least, and the sense that she always wanted something from me that I couldn’t give her, couldn’t even identify. Could I really leave all this behind for mere perfection?
I thought I could.
I looked at Jackie. She was still watching my face, and her eyes were half filled with moisture. “Jackie,” I said.
“I can’t, Dexter,” she said. “I just can’t.”
I stood up and went to sit beside her on the chaise longue. “I can,” I said, and I kissed her. For just a moment she held back, and then she kissed me, too.
And it turned out that things weren’t really all that different in daylight. Not even right there on the balcony …
TWENTY-SEVEN
OUR UNSCHEDULED SIESTA ON THE CHAISE LONGUE BLENDED right into a surprise nap, and then a startling wake-up, which led to a second shower, and that took a great deal longer than it should have and ended up in Jackie’s bed again. And the whole day passed in a lazy fog of stupid jokes and comfy dozing, and before I knew it, it was night.
And the next morning, Monday, came much too quickly and caught us both in a nearly comatose state, lost in a sleep so deep that we didn’t hear the house phone until the third time it rang. I staggered out of bed and grabbed it, to learn that the limo driver was waxing wroth and demanding our immediate materialization in his car or we would be late on set and the forces of darkness would overwhelm his Town Car.
I quickly brushed my teeth and hair, and Jackie repaired her hair and makeup, and a very few minutes later we were catching our breath in the backseat of the limo, on our way to work.
We said no more about the future, but it was very much on my mind. It seemed the height of irony to me that although I had never really wanted to be saddled with a woman—except as part of my disguise—now I was hooked up to two of them. It was a bizarre situation for me, nearly surreal. I would never have guessed that among my other faults I was a satyr, a lecher, Don Juan Dexter, sauntering through life with a priapic smirk, eager hordes of feminine pulchritude trailing along in my wake. What a rascal I was—and how stupidly happy it made me. It was like living some absurd teen fantasy: hop out of bed with my pet goddess and then away in the limo. Off to a hard day on the set, lunch with my agent, saunter through an interview or two, always pausing along the way to allow the throngs of adoring women to bask in the glow of my radiant mojo. Dionysian Dexter, the surprise god of love.
My effervescent mood—and an accompanying silence from Jackie—lasted all the way to the soundstage the production had hired for the first day’s shooting. It was a few blocks in from the river, on the north edge of the Little Havana area, and in spite of the very best efforts of our driver, we were ten minutes late.
“Shit!” Jackie said, as we drove through the gate and into the parking lot. “I hate being late. It always looks like diva bullshit.”
“We have a really good excuse,” I said.
She smiled and squeezed my hand. “Yes, we do,” she said, “but not the kind of thing I can explain to the director.”
“You want me to tell him?” I said.
“Let’s just not do it again,” she said. I raised an eyebrow at her and she laughed. “The late part, I mean,” she added.
The car coasted to a halt in front of the big roll-up doors, and I looked up to see the driver watching us with interest in the rearview mirror. Our eyes met, and he winked. “We’re here, Miss Forrest,” he said.
“Thank you,” Jackie said. She made a move for the door handle, but the driver was already out of the car and opening the door for her.
“I was told to say that everyone is gathering in the conference room,” the driver said as I climbed out. He nodded at the smaller metal door beside the large roll-up. “At the end of the hall, on the right,” he said.
“Everyone?” Jackie said. “Or just the cast?”
The driver shook his head. “I don’t know, miss,” he said. “They told me everyone—they didn’t tell me what that meant.”
Jackie bit her lip and frowned, then shook herself slightly. “Thanks,” she told the driver, rewarding him with a small smile.
He bowed his head ever so slightly. “All part of the service,” he said.
We went in through the door the driver had indicated, into a longish hallway painted a truly annoying light green color. On the right we passed two doors that opened onto the stage itself. On the left, the walls were decorated with smudges of paint, grease, and what I hoped was peanut butter. Midway we passed a large bulletin board festooned with notices, flyers, warnings from OSHA, and important safety regulations. Just beyond that we began to hear the buzz of conversation coming from the end of the hall. Jackie slowed her step and glanced at me. “You know what this means, don’t you?” she said in a low and worried voice.
“The jelly doughnuts will be all gone?” I said.
Her smile was a little bit mechanical. “This is it,” she said. “This is where they tell everybody about Patrick. And then they introduce my replacement.” She took her lower lip between her teeth and bit down on it. “Oh, shit,” she said. “I can’t do this. Not with Rob—with everybody watching and secretly gloating.”
I was sure she had started to say “Robert,” and stopped herself after one loathsome syllable, and I felt a surge of sympathy. One of the few bits of human behavior I do understand is the natural reluctance to let your enemies see you humiliated. And since Jackie was with me now, and the enemy was an annoying pimple like Robert, I felt it, too. But I didn’t see any way to avoid it, either.
So I put an arm around Jackie’s shoulders and drew her close. “They can’t replace you,” I said.
She shook her head. “I don’t see how they can avoid it. The insurance—”
“I will make them an offer they can’t refuse,” I said with my cheeks puffed out. It was not a very good imitation, and she did not give it a very good smile—but it was, at least, a smile.
“Thanks, Don Vito,” she said. She pulled away from me, straightened her shoulders, and put on a small and confident smile. “Let’s get it done,” she said, and she marched toward the door at the end of the hall. I trailed behind, wondering if she was right. Would they really fire her? And if so, what happened to me? I might convince her that she still needed my special kind of protection—but what if she decided to flee? Fly back to L.A., or even someplace far away, where the hypothetical Patrick couldn’t find her? Would I be invited to tag along to Sumatra, or Dubai, or Brisbane, wherever she ran to? I hoped so, but there was no way to know for sure.
Before I could decide, Jackie was there at the door to the conference room. She paused once again to compose herself, and then stepped through the doorway, with Dexter trailing behind like the tail to her comet.
Robert, Renny, and several others I didn’t recognize were already seated at the large oak table that ran down the center of the room. Another cluster of people stood at the far end, where a coffee urn crouched beside several very promising-looking pastry boxes.
Somehow, Jackie fought off the siren call of the doughnuts, and marched right down the table, so I followed along. Robert called from his seat on the opposite side. “Hey, Dexter!” he said as we passed, and beside him, Renny nodded. I waved, and joined Jackie at a seat that was as far from Robert as she could get and still be in the conference room. Happily for me, there was an empty chair beside hers, and I slid into it.
Jackie immediately started chattering with the woman on her right, apparently working to establish that she was confident, lighthearted, and completely in control of a perfect universe. I looked around the room and studied the people crowded in. The group at the coffee urn seemed to be mostly technical people. They wore clothing that was worn and functional, occasionally decorated with clamps, rolls of tape, and other arcane tools.
The group at the table would have to be actors. They were not as well dressed as the crew, but their grubbiness was calculated and looked expensive. Their frequent smiles revealed universally perfect teeth, and they all glanced furtively at one another, as if to make sure no one was sneaking up behind them with a machete. I didn’t see Deborah anywhere, and I couldn’t decide if that was good or bad.
A moment later, Debs came in behind Mr. Eissen and Captain Matthews, and then I knew: It was bad. Her face was set in its most rigid, stony, I-Am-a-Cop mask, the one that showed that she was ruled by discipline and duty and had never had any soft feelings in her entire life. But because I knew her so well, I could see that behind the mask she was seething, and as Detective Anderson followed her through the doorway, smirking, I understood why. This was a public firing squad, and the only real questions were how many bullets, and what caliber.
Eissen went straight to the head of the table, and Captain Matthews followed right behind, with only one wistful glance at the doughnuts to show us that he was still just a cop. Debs was one step behind him, and Anderson brought up the rear, locking his eyes onto Jackie with a kind of knowing, superior leer on his face.
Eissen sat down in the only empty chair; Matthews looked for another and didn’t see one, but his glance fell on Deborah, and he frowned at her before turning back around to stand at Eissen’s elbow, in a posture that showed he really preferred to remain standing.
“Thank you for being prompt,” Eissen said quietly, and the room fell silent so quickly and completely that I wondered whether I had gone deaf. “I know you are all eager to get to work.…” He gave a very thin smile to show that this might be taken as a joke, but nobody laughed. “So I will try to keep this brief.” He glanced up at Matthews, and then stared down the length of the table toward Jackie, and I felt her stiffen slightly. “It has come to my attention that we have a … situation,” he said, and he paused to tear his eyes away from Jackie and look around the room before going on. “Miss Forrest has received a number of very credible threats on her life.”
Even Eissen’s icy presence couldn’t prevent the immediate mutter of shock and wonder that blew through the room, and he waited it out, cold blue eyes fixed on Jackie. She just smiled, outwardly unworried and carefree, and my opinion of her acting ability went up two notches.
“In the normal course of events,” Eissen went on, and the room grew deathly still again, “we would delay the production and recast Miss Forrest’s part.” He smiled, an even thinner and less humorous twitch of the lips that made me wish I was armed. “For her own protection, of course, as well as to protect what is a considerable investment of the Big Ticket Network’s time and money.” He nodded at Jackie, and she nodded back, with a much better fake smile than Eissen’s.
“However,” he said, and under the table I felt Jackie’s hand clamp onto mine, “in this case we have come up with what we hope will be a … productive alternative.” He frowned slightly, as if he was unhappy with his choice of adjective. “There are certain risks involved, but after consulting with Captain Matthews”—Eissen tilted his head to the side, and Matthews cleared his throat and then nodded—“and the detective in this case …” Anderson made a slight move, as if to step forward and say his name, but Eissen went right on, and Anderson settled back and continued to stare furtively, and hungrily, at Jackie.
“… I believe these risks can be minimized,” Eissen said. He spread his hands to indicate the whole room. “The entire cast and crew are here, in a relatively expensive location, and that represents a great deal of money. If we delay the production now, that money is lost. And so I have decided”—Eissen closed his eyes and gave his tiny smile again—“in consultation with the network, of course”—he opened his eyes again—“that we will go forward as scheduled. With … Miss Forrest.”
Jackie squeezed my hand so hard I thought she might break bones, and once again a whisper of surprise filled the room. Eissen waited for it to fade, and then went on.
“I admit I have been influenced by my publicity staff, who are … excited … by the kind of buzz this situation will create.” He nodded twice, and said, “A show about a policewoman who c
hases killers—shot while a real killer chases her.” Once more his lips moved into a thin smile. “When I say ‘shot’ I mean the pilot, not Miss Forrest.”
Nobody laughed at this frigid flight of wit. It might have been his timing.
“In any case,” Eissen went on, “this will almost certainly generate some very good publicity.”
“And if I get killed,” Jackie said, “it’s even better publicity.”
Eissen fixed his deadly stare on Jackie, but the quick bark of laughter from nearly everyone else in the room stopped him from optically flogging her, instead forcing him to put on his awful little smile again. “There is that,” he said, and he got his own, slightly smaller laugh this time. “Of course, we all hope it won’t come to that.” Someone near the coffee urn muttered, “Of course.” Eissen ignored that and went on.
“You have all signed a nondisclosure agreement,” he said. “Our lawyers assure me”—and he paused for a moment to let us all feel the weight of that word—“that it applies to this situation. If you speak of this to anyone … Well, take my advice and don’t.” I looked around the room; it looked to me like nobody thought Eissen was kidding.
“Captain Matthews has assured me that his people can supply enough security to minimize the risk. For all of us. And I am asking you all to be extra-vigilant. This is a closed set. If you see anybody who doesn’t belong, or notice anything out of the ordinary, tell a policeman. There will be plenty of them around.” He glanced at Matthews, and the captain nodded.
“All right,” Eissen said. “Let’s go make a pilot.” He gave a very slight wave of his hand. “Captain?”
Captain Matthews cleared his throat and stepped forward, frowning solemnly at all of us. “I want to reassure you all,” he said. “We have this situation completely under control, and the investigation is moving forward in a very … ahemp. A satisfying manner.” His frown deepened. “That is, we are quite confident that there is no significant danger that can’t be, ah …” He glanced at Anderson, who just stood there, unsuccessfully trying to look serious and competent. “The investigating officer has assured me,” Matthews said, and his tone made Anderson stand a little straighter, “that an arrest is expected very shortly.” Anderson squirmed slightly, and Matthews paused for several powerful throat-clearing noises, a ploy I was quite sure he meant to let Anderson appreciate the fact that it was a threat—and probably to cover his own embarrassment at having to deliver such a dreadful Cop Cliché. “Arrest is expected” is an ancient phrase that means, freely translated, “We don’t have a clue,” and Matthews had used it very publicly to make certain that if an arrest did not, in fact, materialize, it would be Anderson’s fault.