KW 09:Shot on Location (12 page)

29.

It was after eleven when Jake and Bert and the dog made it back to town. They’d called Joey from the road, asked him to stake out the compound and let them know if Ace showed up. They’d heard nothing so they headed straight to Duval Street to search for him. Given the rush and tumult of the previous few days, Jake had not yet managed to get down there. Seeing the famously raucous and libidinous boulevard for the first time at eleven-thirty on a night in high season was somewhere between a tease, a tickle, and a full-scale madhouse assault.

Transvestite hookers vamped in red high heels with vertiginous platforms, fishnet stockings tracing out their lean and freshly shaven legs. Drunk young ladies from Southern colleges teetered by in wet sorority T-shirts, their hairdos wrecked and their nipples taut and finely crinkled like the pits of apricots. Biker guys lumbered past, their sleeveless leather vests festooned with studs and club regalia. Stirred in among the more colorful characters was an array of average-looking tourists, regular folks, some seeming amazed at what a good time they were having, some clinging to each other and looking meekly down as if they feared that too frank a gaze would turn them into pillars of salt. From a dozen doorways and patios blared bursts of competing music and manic laughter.

Bert led the way to Sloppy Joe’s, with its big glassless windows and famous logo of Hemingway in a bulky turtleneck in which he must have sweltered. Inside the place, there were guys dressed up like pirates, with do-rags on their heads and gold hoops in their ears; there were guys tattooed in lavish colors and guys tattooed in basic indigo. There was a guy with a cockatiel, a guy with a monkey, a woman with a ferret that calmly nestled between her breasts. But there was no one who looked like a two hundred-fifty pound enforcer. Jake and Bert had one beer and left.

At Captain Tony’s the crowd was slightly more sedate but also more leathery and cranky. Serious drinkers, sunshine etched deep into their corrugated hides. Maybe a neighborhood bully or two, but no goombahs.

Hog’s Breath presented a row of silver ponytails and wizened backsides that seemed to have melted into their customary barstools. Rick’s was full of kids firing down bizarre drinks made of things like jello and oyster juice; Margaritaville was populated mainly by women of a certain age pretending to be girls again, waiting for a pickup attempt if only for the nearly forgotten satisfaction of being asked and saying no. There was no sign of their quarry, and at one-thirty or so, with Bert sporadically nodding out and the tiny chihuahua yawning as widely as a hippopotamus, they gave up.

Jake drove Bert home, then went to the compound, where he found Joey lightly dozing in a poolside lounge. He’d seen no sign of Ace. Jake thanked him for the use of the car and handed him the keys. Joey wished him luck and left.

For a few moments the writer stood there alone by the pool. The night was very still, so quiet that he could hear insect wings spanking against nearby streetlights. The moon had set and the stars were softened in their twinkling by a gauze of humidity that was like the merest memory of a cloud. It was extraordinarily peaceful, and Jake, for the moment, felt peaceful too; in part at least because he knew there was more to be done and he had somehow become serene in the rather reckless belief that he could do it. He savored this fragile conviction for a few more fragrant breaths, then stepped around the pool to the shed where Bryce lived.

There was a line of pallid light beneath the ill-fitting door. Jake knocked very softly and Bryce immediately said, “Come in.” He was lying on his bed beneath a fraying sheet, his elbows splayed across his pillows and his lightly laced fingers cradling his head.

Straddling the threshold of the shed, Jake said, “You’re a trusting guy. You don’t even ask who’s there?”

Bryce said, “It’s two o’clock in the morning, who’s it gonna be?”

Jake said, “I thought you might be sleeping.”

“I don’t sleep that much at night,” said Bryce. “Little catnaps now and then. Nights I mostly think.”

“What about?”

“Stuff I might do sometime. Accomplishments. Adventures. Stuff like that.”

“Ah,” said Jake, and glanced at the random calendars tacked to the wall.

He said nothing more and after a moment Bryce asked, “Is there some particular reason you’re stopping by?”

Jake hesitated. “I don’t know if it’s really fair to ask you.”

Bryce sat up in bed. “Ask me, ask me.”

“Okay,” said Jake. “Remember when you said that if I was going to play detective, maybe you could be my helper?”

By way of answer, Bryce sat up higher and clawed at the confining sheet.

“Well here’s your chance,” Jake said.

30.

Perhaps an hour of quiet waiting had gone by when Jake and Bryce first heard the pick scratching at the keyhole of Donna’s cottage. Metal pressed metal deep in the works of the flimsy lock, then the doorknob turned with a small but grating squeak. There was a brief pause, a tiny rustling. A heartbeat later Ace’s bulk was glutting up the doorway and he stepped heavily across the threshold.

From behind the open door, standing in near perfect darkness, Jake called out his name.

The big man swiveled toward the sound. Bryce sprang up from his hiding place behind the sofa and brained him with a Dustbuster. The blow caught Ace just aft of the crown of his head and was delivered with such force that the plastic casing of the small appliance shattered and flew off, leaving the suction motor and dirt bag exposed. Ace hovered for a moment, swaying in a lazy circle. Then he abruptly dropped to his knees and lingered briefly as though praying before pitching forward flat on his face at Jake’s feet.

As he fell, something flew from his hands. Jake felt a tickle of almost weightless objects falling against his legs and insteps.

Bryce switched on a light and the two allies regarded their prostrate foe with the mute fascination that might greet the appearance of a dead shark washed up on a beach. His giant legs were folded at a restful angle. His bunched shoulders were lifted in a bewildered shrug. A small smudge of blood was visible through his hair at the point of impact. And what had fallen from his hands, and now lay spread across the floorboards and over Jake’s sneakers, was a huge bouquet of assorted flowers. There were slightly wilted roses, curling lilies, irises that sagged. There were crinkly mums and sunflowers missing petals here and there.

Jake looked down at the incongruous and inexplicable array and felt a moment’s doubt and remorse. He gingerly nudged Ace with his toe to see if he would move. He didn’t. He said to Bryce, “Maybe you didn’t need to hit him quite so hard.”

Bryce still had the ruined Dustbuster in his hand. Absently, he plucked some lint from its filter. “Better too hard than not hard enough. What’s up with the flowers?”

Jake said, “I have no idea.” Very carefully, backing and sidling, he moved away from the scattered bouquet and the unconscious giant. “I guess we better tie him up.”

Part 3

31.

In Los Angeles it was only midnight, and Quentin Dole was still working. Sitting in his Santa Monica apartment, the damp light off the Pacific mingling with the designer halogen above his desk, he was sorting through a pile of ratings reports, magazine clippings, and media summaries, parsing the data in a dizzy-making effort to understand the tendencies and fickle desires of the viewing public.

What he had before him was infuriating but it painted no clear picture. By almost any measure, his and Jacqueline’s strategy of portraying what had happened to Donna as possibly an abortive attempt on the life of Candace McBride had been a definite success. Candace had sold the story brilliantly and the press had bought it wholesale. She’d done nearly a dozen on-air interviews; her portrait graced the covers of several mass-market magazines; her name was all over the tabloids. And yet the ratings had actually gone down. Gone down, it’s true, by the tiniest of increments, maybe just a statistical blip. Then again, it was by tiny increments, defections by a tiny fraction of the audience, that TV shows lost their cachet and eventually their time slot. What the hell was going on?

The driven producer whose future was glued to the success of the program wracked his brains over the conundrum, and the best answer he could come up with was only another question: Was it possible that the public had become more interested in the melodrama surrounding the show than in the show itself? That the hype, on its own, had become more compelling than the product being touted? A fine irony that would be for a spinner of fictions-within-fictions, a creator of stories with stories of their own to tell.

Dole switched off the desk light, poured himself a scotch and popped a sleeping pill. His last thought before slipping off into a sporadic and uneasy sleep was that perhaps Candace McBride had rather suddenly become too big for her role, had gone from being his greatest asset to becoming a distraction and a liability. She was on the cusp of becoming bigger than the show, and this was not allowable. No one, with the possible exception of Quentin Dole himself, could be bigger than the show.

---

Also awake at that late hour was the strange blonde woman who’d arrived in Key West by speedboat and had set about trailing and tormenting the faithless, selfish actress who’d betrayed and destroyed her brother.

The blonde, whose true name was Marguerite Bouchard, was lying chastely in her bed at Hannah’s Hideaway, reading. The big amber shades she wore by day had been replaced by a pair of simple reading glasses. The glasses, together with the felt-tip marker she held in her hand and the rather careless way her hair spread out on the pillow beneath her, gave her an aspect that was more scholarly than dangerous. She was reading not from a book but from a looseleaf binder such as people use at school; she might almost have been a grad student in literature, studying for exams. She read awhile, then stopped to underline or highlight or scribble notes in the margin. When she wrote, her tongue moved to the corner of her mouth in concentration.

After a while she put the notebook aside and got up out of bed. She pulled on her snug pants that buttoned just below the knee and strapped on her gladiator sandals. She squeezed into her tight leather jacket and grabbed the ignition key to her speedboat. It was an odd time to go for a boat ride, but the obsessed blonde woman had an errand to run that could only be accomplished while most of the world was sleeping. From the small fridge in her hotel room she took a glass jar with air holes punched in its dull metal top and headed for the marina.

32.

In the roughly five minutes it took Ace to regain consciousness, Bryce had gathered up the scattered flowers, arranging them into a rather rustic yet artful bouquet. He hummed softly as he did so, like a clerk in a fancy florist’s shop.

When the big man finally came to, he didn’t wake up all at once. His bound ankles gave a twitch then were motionless again. His tied hands attempted to move away from the small of his back and seemed surprised that they could not accomplish this. He briefly raised his head but its weight was too much to support just yet and it fell back to the floor. At last he opened his eyes, blinking and squinting. His pupils were pinwheeling and his focus was smeared so that images were ghosted at the edges. Through the haze and glare he saw Jake sitting in a chair above him. “Who the fuck are you?” he slurred.

“Friend of Donna’s. Live next door.”

Ace considered this quite calmly. “Wha’d you hit me for?”

“I didn’t.”

Bryce got up from the sofa and came around where Ace could see him. Without malice but with a sort of bashful pride, he said, “I did.”

Craning his neck, Ace said, “You scrawny little bastard. Just because I threw you in the pool?”

Bryce looked to Jake, who was trying to gather his thoughts. It was very late. He was exhausted, flummoxed by the flowers, and his certainty had begun to fade. Groping for a tone that suited the moment, he said gruffly, “Because you ran Donna over with a speedboat.”

“I
what
?”

Hoping to sound confident and prosecutorial, Jake said, “Don’t deny it. She dumped you and you ran her over.”

“No I didn’t.”

The simplicity of the denial stymied Jake and he stalled in his interrogation.

Ace went on. “You guys have this totally ass backwards wrong.”

Bryce jumped in and tried to help. “You took her script. I saw you take it.”

The big man on the floor said, “Yeah, I took the script. What of it?”

Jake said, “You took it because it had the schedule so you’d know when she’d be in the water.”

For the first time in the conversation the bound man seemed agitated. He kicked at the leg ropes, strained at the ones around his wrists. Miserably, he said, “I didn’t know it had the schedule. I didn’t know what would happen. If I knew what was gonna happen I never woulda took it.”

“Why’d you take it then?” asked Bryce.

“That’s none of your business. Come on, untie me.”

“Why’d you take the script?” Jake pressed.

“It was a job, okay? Someone paid me.”

“Who? Charlie Ponte?”

At the mention of the name, Ace stiffened as if tased. “How the fuck you know Ponte?”

“Never mind how. It was his speedboat you were driving, right?”

“Just to come down here and grab the notebook. Ponte didn’t even know.”

“Go on.”

“Go on, what?”

“Then who’d you take the script for?”

“I don’t know.”

Warming to the cross-examination, Jake said, “Bullshit, you don’t know. How could you not know?”

“Look, I got the job through a middle man. Said it was for some rich wacko fan. I didn’t ask questions. What did I care? I got paid five grand and it was easy. Plus I was mad at Donna. That much I admit. But that was then, not now. Now lemme up off the fucking floor. My head hurts like a bastard.”

“Who’s the middle man?” Jake asked.

“What?”

“The guy who hired you to grab the script.”

Ace shook his head as well as he could manage. “Don’t go there. That’s the kind of thing that gets people whacked. Leave it the fuck alone and let me up.”

Jake looked at Bryce. Bryce looked at Jake. They were softening but they were still afraid to let the big man loose. “One more question first,” Jake said. “The flowers.”

“What about ’em?”

“Why you carrying flowers in the middle of the night?”

“Are you guys stupid or what? Why’m I carrying flowers. I’m carrying flowers ’cause Donna gets home tomorrow. I called the hospital.”

“She won’t want to see you,” said Jake.

With surprising wistfulness, Ace said, “That’s possible. I was a real jerk before. But I want her to have flowers to come home to. And I wanna take care of her. If she’ll let me. Can’t you understand that? Ain’t you guys ever been in love?”

Ashamed, Jake and Bryce glanced over at the extravagant if slightly past its peak bouquet. In a conciliatory way, Bryce said, “That’s a lot of flowers. Where you get ’em all, this hour?”

“The cemetery. Where else? Spent like three hours finding them in the fucking dark. Now will you assholes please untie me?”