KW 09:Shot on Location (11 page)

26.

“What’re you, some kinda wannabe detective?”

“No, Mr. Ponte. Not at all.”

They were sitting in the boss’s enormous office. Behind the wall of windows, a lingering pink dusk was painted on the sky above Biscayne Bay; the water underneath it was lifted in shallow folds and spattered with color like a dropcloth. Jake and Bert had been met at the twenty-second floor landing by a pair of bodyguards, then passed along to a second team of goons who’d stopped them in an anteroom and patted them down. This was a quite different pat-down from the bashful tickle-sessions Jake had occasionally experienced at airports. Here it was meaty hands clawing at his armpits, gasping at his legs, poking into the crannies of his groin and probing the cleft between his buttocks. By the time he was passed along to the inner sanctum he felt like he’d had some sort of deranged massage.

“What then?” Ponte went on. “Lemme guess: You’ve got a wrong to right and you think I’m Marlon Brando.”

Jake could not help glancing at Bert, and Ponte shrewdly followed his eyes.

With a laugh the boss said, “I knew it! I knew that line of bullshit would come from the old man! Good ol’ Bert the Shirt. Love ya, ya old bastard.
Here’s how to get around Cholly Ponte: Make him feel like Marlon Brando.
’Cept Bert, you’re the last guy in America who still believes in that Crusader Rabbit shit. The rest of us, we’re just trying to make a living and get through the day. But okay, kid, you’re here. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

Jake fumbled a moment, trying to decide where to start, and during that interval Ponte suddenly noticed the chihuahua nestled in Bert’s lap. “Bert,” he said, “you got a new dog.”

“Same dog.”

“Same dog my ass. That other dog’d be like forty years old by now.”

“Same dog.”

There was an effort toward certainty in Bert’s voice but a slight veil of confusion in his eyes, and Jake cut in to try to rescue him.

“Mr. Ponte,” he said, “the other day there was an accident down near Key West. A woman got run over by a speedboat.”

“Broad from the TV show, right? I think I saw something on the news.”

“Right.”

“Ya hosin’ her?”

“Excuse me?”

“The broad who got run over. Ya boinkin’ her?”

“No. She’s just a friend. An acquaintance, really.”

“So what’s it to you she got run over?”

“I saw it happen.”

“Yeah. So?”

“It just wasn’t right, that’s all.”

“Lotsa shit ain’t right. What of it?”

Jake squirmed, intensely aware of the large thug positioned behind his chair, and carefully considered his phrasing. As he was considering it, Bert jumped in to help him out.

“My friend here, he ain’t makin’ any accusations, but one of your guys, Ace his name is, used to be this woman’s boyfriend till she threw him out on his ass, so we’re wondering if maybe in any slight or incidental way he might have been involved in her misfortune.”

“That’s not an accusation?” Ponte said. “To me it sounds a great deal like an accusation.”

“Okay, it’s a little like an accusation,” Jake admitted. “But it’s no reflection on you, Mr. Ponte.”

Unfortunately, at that moment Bert drifted off into one of his tangential thoughts that came blurting out an instant off the beat. “Though of course he would’ve had to get a boat from somewhere.”

Ponte’s face hardened. The change at first was nothing more than a slight adjustment to the crinkles at the outside corners of his eyes. He said, “Bert, we’re old friends and all, but watch yourself.”

Undaunted or perhaps just oblivious, Bert kept tracking his own line of thought. “I mean, a guy at Ace’s level, he’s not gonna have a half-mil speedboat to call his own.”

“Shut up, old man. I mean it.” The boss was glaring now and pointing a thick finger at Bert’s face.

Softly, Jake said, “Can we please back up a minute, Mr. Ponte? Forget the accusations. All I’m asking from you is to help me find Ace so I can talk to him.”

At this simple comment the thug behind Jake’s chair began to laugh. His laugh was a sporadic, high-pitched titter like an oboe with a splintered reed and it was wildly incongruous coming from his massive body. Jake could not help swiveling toward him and saying, “What’s funny?”

“You wanna talk to Ace. That’s funny.”

Ponte seemed to welcome this touch of levity and forced himself to smile along. “How much you weigh, kid?”

“One-sixty, one-sixty-five.”

“You lift weights, anything like that?”

Jake just sat there feeling rather insubstantial.

“I didn’t think so,” Ponte said. “Ace goes two-fifty. I’ve seen him bench press three-twenty-five. I’ve also seen him break a guy’s arm so bad that he could scratch his elbow with his thumb. If he had a thumb. And you just wanna have a friendly little chat with him about whether he almost killed his girlfriend?”

Jake had trouble coming up with a reply.

Ponte paused a moment then resumed. “You don’t talk to Ace.
I’ll
talk to Ace.”

Again Jake found no ready words and Ponte went on as if airing out hurt feelings. “That’s right. Me. I’ll deal with it. You think I’d condone that kind of shit? You think that kind of shit would fly with me?”

Seeming to emerge from a trance, Bert said, “See. I told you he was old school. I said he was.”

Ponte ignored him and said to his goons, “Any a you cheese-dicks know where Ace is?”

There was a silence in which an array of uncertain and guilty glances panned across the room. Finally one of the thugs walked over and whispered something in Ponte’s ear.

Ponte said, “Ya sure?”

The goon nodded that he was.

Ponte said, “That doesn’t sound good.”

The goon shrugged.

Ponte said casually, “Too late, kid. Your little mercy mission. Sweet idea, I respect it, but too late. Guy says Ace headed to Key West an hour ago. Said he had some unfinished business to attend to.”

Without realizing he was getting up, Jake found himself halfway out of his chair. The goon pushed him back down into it again. “Mr. Ponte, he’ll kill her. Someone’s got to stop him.”

Ponte raised his hands, fending off responsibility.

“You said you’d help! Two minutes ago. You promised.”

“Don’t tell me what I promised. That is never a good idea. I said I’d talk to him. I didn’t say I’d chase him up and down the state of Florida. I got a business to run here. Priorities. I got people to see.”

“And that’s more important than someone getting killed?”

Without hesitation Ponte said, “Way more.”

Jake bit his lower lip and squeezed the arms of his chair. “Okay. Okay. I’ll find him myself. I’ll deal with him myself.”

Once again he started rising from his chair and this time the bodyguard let him. Ponte shot him a sort of valedictory glance and said, “I wish you well, kid. I really do. You got Blue Cross?”

27.

Jake gunned the engine of the El Dorado.

The car was still parked in front of Charlie Ponte’s condo, not in gear, and of course it went nowhere. Still, there was a kind of release in high-revving the archaic old V-8, hearing the roar, feeling the quiver of the chassis as the gas exploded in the cylinders and the pistons slammed in their exigent rhythm, straining the rivets in the engine block. The brief and rising roar suggested assertion and decisiveness. Then it dwindled into a softly clattering purr as the motor returned to idle, and Jake sat there in the driver’s seat feeling rather helpless. “Shit, Bert,” he said. “Guy’s got an hour head start. Now what do I do?”

Sitting somewhat slumped on the passenger side, Bert contemplatively stroked the head of his chihuahua as if he was rubbing his own chin. “Broad’s still inna hospital, right?”

“She gets out tomorrow morning.”

“That’s okay then,” the old man said. “Nothin’s gonna happen while she’s inna hospital.”

“You sure?”

“My age, I ain’t sure of nothin’. But I’m pretty sure. I’d say we got all night to find him.”

“We?”

“Hey, I don’t sleep good anyway. Ya gotta be awake, ya might as well be doin’ somethin’, right?”

Jake didn’t so much consider the comment as absorb it.
Might as well be doing something.
Well, of course. Doing
anything.
Action! That was the key, he realized--the key to beating back helplessness, refreshing his resolve. Just
do
something, then do something else, and something else again, until decisive action became a habit and a reflex that might actually lead to results and maybe even pass for courage. He put the giant car in gear and, showing off for no one but himself, burned rubber as he headed back down the Keys.

---

By that time, Charlie Ponte’s enormous desk was almost entirely covered in money.

The money had been poured forth from a black satchel carried by the boss’s next appointment, a very handsome man whose perfect salt-and-pepper hair rose and fell in elegant, old-fashioned finger waves. The bills were all crisp new fifties neatly bundled into stacks of twenty. There were two hundred packets in all, and the payment represented a small fraction of what Ponte would realize from a relatively modest investment in an independent film that had caught on. He stared down at the cheery profusion of cash and smiled. He had never lost his zest for making money and in this he was a fortunate man. “These Hollywood deals,” he said, “when they pay off they pay off good.”

“Nature of the business,” said Handsome Johnny Burke. “High risk, high reward.”

“The reward part I like,” said Ponte.

“Plus it’s totally legit,” Johnny added.

Which was true if you chose to overlook a couple of inconvenient facts, such as that the money that Ponte channeled into movie projects had originally been obtained through theft, extortion, and occasionally murder. Still, by the time the profits had been filtered through a fancy L.A. law firm and the experienced bookkeepers at Handsome Johnny’s Crab Joint, the money had been scrubbed quite clean. But again, on the less savory side of the ledger, Ponte seemed to regard the funds he tendered as either investments or loans, depending entirely on his own advantage. If a movie succeeded, the Miami boss counted himself as a savvy investor and took a goodly cut of the box office. If it tanked, he regarded his stake as a loan that needed to be paid back anyway. The lawyers and accountants tried tactfully to point out the illogic of this position, but to Ponte it made perfect sense, and it was Ponte’s money, after all.

With the payoff piled right there on the desk between them, Handsome Johnny seized an opportunity to remind the other man of his value to him. “My West Coast connections,” he said. “Been working pretty sweet.”

Not wanting his sometime business partner to feel too good about himself, Ponte said, “Course, you’ve brought me some real duds, too.”

His toothsome smile tightening just slightly, Johnny said once again, “Nature of the business.”

“Like that fucking genius who killed himself. Why’d you have me invest in a suicidal lunatic? Total loss on that one.”

Suddenly solemn, Johnny said, “A tragedy.”

“For who?” said Ponte. “Him or me? Schmuck blows his brains out, I’m out half a million bucks.” The boss wagged his head sadly then grew philosophical. “Besides, what kind of asshole kills himself at thirty? Unless he gets whacked he’s got his whole life in front of him. The beach. Pussy. Food. Beautiful things. Okay, he’s got some problems. Who doesn’t? But what a fucking cop-out. Play your hand, man! You lose, you lose. Am I right or am I right?”

“You’re right,” said Johnny.

Getting back to business, Ponte said, “And I don’t really buy this crap that we can’t collect just because the fucking guy is dead.”

Handsome Johnny shrugged. “He spent the money. Legitimately. On the movie. The accountants have a record of it. Location scouting. Promos. Guarantees to actors. He spent it. It’s gone.”

The notion of his money being gone, the seeming finality of it, offended Ponte and he suddenly went from being philosophical to starting to get angry. Earlier in the conversation he really hadn’t been. Thorny, maybe, but not yet angry. But that’s how anger was with him; it came on without much warning, like gas pains, and he himself could not control it or even say exactly why it had been triggered at a certain juncture and not another. Now he twined his fingers, turned his palms away, and pressed outward till the knuckles cracked. “There’s gotta be a way to get that money back. Some of it, at least.”

“Sorry, but I just don’t think there is. Let it go. You’ll more than make it up on this other movie.”

That did not satisfy Ponte. “Ain’t there someone we can squeeze?”

“Who? This director, this Bouchard, he took the money on his own. It was his loan, his deal. There was no one else involved.”

“There’s gotta somebody who’ll make good. Family? Wife? Girlfriend?”

Handsome Johnny didn’t want to go there. “Charlie, please, it isn’t worth the bother.”

“Getting paid is always worth the bother.”

“Even from a dead guy?”

“Not everybody’s dead. Find me someone we can squeeze.”

“But Charlie —”

Ponte cut him off. He’d made up his mind. It was his money and someone had to pay it back. “There’s gotta be somebody. There always is.”

28.

The small bar at The Nest was called Nellie’s and it was very different from most of Key West’s other bars. It was quiet; it was decorous. There was no live music, no stale beer smell, no Jimmy Buffett songs playing on the soundtrack. At Nellie’s you could have a peaceful drink without hearing the loud life story of someone who’d moved down years before from Michigan and how it was the best thing that he ever did, and on and on and on.

Nellie’s was where Candace McBride had most of her dinners. Sometimes another cast member joined her, seldom the same cast member more than once, but usually she ate alone, sipping Chardonnay, picking at shrimp. The bartenders handled her perfectly. They made it clear that they recognized her as a star and then they backed off, waiting for clues as to what she needed from them at a given moment. If she needed to be fussed over, they fussed. If she needed to be left alone, they polished glasses and acted like she wasn’t there. Candace badly needed a place like that, a place that suited her many moods and in fact adjusted itself, like lighting on a stage, in accordance with them.

But now that she was being stalked, she feared that even this cozy and inviolate hiding place might be spoiled for her. What if the weird blonde woman suddenly came walking in to stare at her? To
see
her in a way that no one else seemed able to, to look right past the artifice and the willed impressions to who and what she really was. That sense of truly being seen was what she found so supremely unsettling in the woman’s unremitting gaze; the mere thought of it put a jumpy feeling in her legs, made her hands feel tight and clammy. Sitting at a corner of the bar where no one could move up behind her, her eyes darted left and right, searching for an enemy.

When Claire came in to find her, she was on her third glass of wine and was rather listlessly pushing some lettuce leaves around a plate. “Mind if I join you?”

“Please,” said the actress. “I’d love some company.”

Climbing onto the barstool next to her, Claire ordered a gin and tonic and asked how she was feeling. A hint of a wistful smile in gratitude for being asked was quickly followed by a narrowing of her violet eyes to convey that she was still troubled. “Not having my easiest day.”

“Well, I have some excellent news for you. The woman who’s been bothering you has checked out.”

Candace dropped her fork and grabbed Claire’s forearm. “Oh, that’s great. I’m so relieved. She’s left town?”

Claire hesitated, hedged. “I guess so.”

Brightening as though a spotlight was being ratcheted up in front of her, Candace said, “So tell me. How’d you find out? Who is she? What do we know about her?”

“I talked to a buddy at the desk. We don’t know much. No real name or anything like that. But it doesn’t matter. She’s gone. And she’s just a nut.”

Candace couldn’t quite accept such a blithe dismissal. “I don’t know. The way she looked at me …”

Trying to keep things light, trying to ease the diva’s mind, Claire said, “Just a nut, believe me. The desk guy thought so too. A harmless wacko. Who knows, maybe some kind of nymphomaniac or something. She used the most ridiculous fake name. Sorda Randy.”

Claire said it with a laugh but it was clear at once that the joke fell flat.

“Randy?”

Awkwardly now, Claire said, “You know, old-fashioned word for horny. Sort of randy. Get it?”

“I used to date a guy named Randy,” Candace said. “Randy Bouchard. Lived with him in fact.”

Making one more attempt at leavening the moment, Claire said, “And did he live up to the billing?”

“He killed himself.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” Claire said. Then, her memory jogged, she thought she recalled seeing, perhaps six months before, a brief item from the L.A.
Times
about the death. The usual paragraph about wasted promise, next to a slick publicity photo of someone talented, beautiful, and gone.

“I wasn’t,” said Candace. “I left him and he killed himself and I wasn’t even sorry. Terrible, right? I was glad to have him out of the way. It would make things easier for me. That’s what I thought at the time. Join me in another drink?”

A slight lift of her head was enough to summon the bartender from the soft shadows of his post. He took their order and slid away again.

“He loved me,” Candace went on. “That was the problem. He said he loved me and he meant it. He wanted us to do great things together, make movies together. He was an upcoming writer and director. He started working on a new script as soon as we started dating. A love story, of course, for me to star in. Passionate. Sizzling. So intense it hurt. He worked on it for a year, then started showing it to the studios. No takers. It was too strange, too raw. But by then he was obsessed with it. He turned down other work, couldn’t think of anything else. Finally he decided to make the movie on his own. He started borrowing money. I don’t know where he got it, but we’re not talking about the corner bank, okay? And it was money he’d never be able to pay back unless the film got made and was a hit.”

The bartender brought the fresh drinks over then moved away as quietly as a geisha.

Claire said, “So then what happened?”

Candace sipped some Chardonnay before resuming. “I bailed.”

“On him? On the movie?”

“Both. But in his mind they were the same thing. The movie was about our love affair. The love affair was about the movie. It was all tied up together. Exciting for a while. Probably fucked up too — this young genius making me his Muse. But meanwhile my career was going nowhere. I started losing faith. I started getting sick of waiting.

“Then, one night, I was at a party in Santa Monica and I heard about this new TV show being cast. They were looking for a fresh face, a relative unknown that they could make a star. And I thought: This is my chance. Mine. Not being anybody’s Muse. Not being the other half of someone else’s dream. So I auditioned and I got the part and I packed a bag and I walked out on Randy and his movie.”

“He didn’t see it coming?”

“Why would he? We hadn’t fought. We still shared a bedroom. Most days we were happy. I just changed my mind. Made a different plan.”

“Did you love him?”

Candace tried to smile but her neck sinews fluttered and the effect was more of a wince. “That’s the thing,” she said. “The awful thing. I don’t know. I didn’t know what it should feel like. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now.”

Claire found nothing to say to that. She dropped her eyes, stirred her drink and fiddled with her slice of lime. In the quiet bar random noises filtered through the awkward pause — the squeak of a chair leg, the clink of glasses, a muffled laugh. Her mind started to wander, linking things that hadn’t seemed related until then. A face that both looked familiar, and didn’t. A preposterous pseudonym. Sorda Randy. Possibly as in
soeur de
Randy? Finally she said, “Your former boyfriend — he have a sister?”