Murder on Location (15 page)

“But if there's been a genuine libel, there are courts to deal with things like that.”

“You can't libel the dead, and Furlong was clever when it came to the living. Don't think a lot of us didn't think of it more than once. I hear this new movie he's written has things in it that shouldn't be anyone else's business. I hear that he's taken a few people he knew and put them down on paper. Oh, he's going to get it one day. I hope I get to him first, that's all.”

I drove back toward the hotel. Icicles were dripping along Lundy's Lane. Merchants were digging notches in the snowbanks left by the snow-plough to let their customers cross the street. In a long narrow restaurant I had my morning coffee and a bran muffin. I hadn't noticed that there were bagels until I'd put strawberry jam on the muffin. There was a drawing of the Parthenon on the paper placemat. I started thinking of Hayes again. Everything moved me in that direction. Even the time. Savas was sitting behind his desk waiting for my call. That's
what my watch told me. The man listening to the Greek hit parade pointed the way to the pay phone.

“Benny, I'm proud of you. You're right on time.” Savas sounded happy. I wondered what was cooking.

“I always pay up, Chris. I was brought up in Ontario. It's in my blood.”

“Well, I've cooled off since I spoke to you. We've been busy ourselves. Found out things. You know.”

“You sound pretty happy.”

“Oh, things are ticking along on the Hayes case. I think we've got a positive identification of the woman coming out of Hayes' room around the time of the murder. A couple of other things are pointing in the same direction. So, I'm less interested in what you plan to contribute than I was.”

“So, you think Miranda Pride bumped Hayes, eh?”

“That's what you think I think. Me? I'm not speaking to the private sector until I know for sure. Where the hell are you phoning from? I know that music.”

“Have you given any thought to the possibility that the mob might be involved in this?”

“It's Theodorakis. I know the words. You want me to sing it?”

“You never sing the song I want to hear. What about the mob? Somebody tried to take me for a ride last night.”

“You should never take a lift from strangers, Benny.”

“Okay, you've clammed up. Damn it all, Chris, I get bad vibes from this whole lousy set-up. We're only looking at the tip of the iceberg …”

And it's called
Ice Bridge
, right?”

I was five minutes early for my meeting with Billie Mason in the coffee shop at the Colonel John. I ordered coffee, had it refilled and tried some cinnamon toast. I told the waitress I was waiting for somebody and she let me wait without pushing more than a third and fourth cup of coffee on me. The place was beginning to fill up with the noon crowd. Some of them were connected with the film company and I overheard snippets of conversations from nearby tables.

“… Charming! Well, at least I don't have to meet the cameras at six in the morning …”

“… I sympathize with you one hundred per cent. It could take twelve corporation lawyers a year to figure it out …”

“… It was a certified blockbuster, number three in
Variety's
list of top rentals …”

After the first forty-five minutes, I could feel my stomach tightening. It wasn't the coffee. She wasn't going to show. I tried the idea out from several directions, and I didn't like any of the possibilities. I kept seeing the beanpole from the parking lot leaning against the open door of his car, slowly chewing gum. The restaurant was crowded to the cash desk when I paid the bill. As I came
out, sucking a free mint, I remembered that I had a fallback position. She had a hair appointment at 2:15. Somehow the feeling in my middle didn't go away and I discarded the mint in an ashtray.

My watch was ticking at half-speed as I sat in the lobby of the Colonel John watching limos arrive at the front door to pick up and deliver small-part players. They stood inside the revolving door, away from the other hotel guests, joking among themselves. Uniformed cops stood near the door to see that nobody lifted it because Peggy O'Toole had walked through. I had over an hour to kill and I'd already spent half an hour on the first ten minutes. I took my anxiety outside to cool down. I walked the quarter mile to where the limos were parked and where the lights and reflectors were set up.

From what I could tell, there was a lot of standing around and waiting in making a movie. Nobody seemed to mind. The formula, according to Wally Skeat, who had passed me through the line of cops standing near the generator truck, was “Hurry up and wait.” He didn't claim that as original, just true. The camera was being moved to a new position near the parapet, shooting back toward the park and the false front of the motel which had now been landscaped so well it looked like it lived there. Bundled up in Anoraks, minks and blankets, Peggy O'Toole, Adela and Jim Sayre were sitting around in a circle with Victoria St. Omer and some of the others in the scene. I
kept out of the way when I saw some flunkies grab a skinny journalist with a tape recorder and chat him right across the road and back to his car. He didn't know what had happened until he was back on the highway. From my corner, I could hear pretty well.

“Well, how do you like that, Dawson? Does it feel right?”

“It's just a trifle short, Jim. I'd feel better with three or four more words to get me all the way across. I've tried spreading the speech, but I sound like I'm trying to draw attention to myself. I suggest you either cut the line completely, or give me a few more words to play with.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, maybe a joke directed at the falls. Something like: ‘We can always go look at the falls.'”

“Adela, would you make a note of that please?” Adela, wearing half-moon glasses on a black string, wrote into her big loose-leaf binder.

“Mr. Sayre,” asked Peggy, “why don't I just go up to him, or take a couple of steps closer. That would make it easier.”

“I think we could use the longer line, Marilyn. So far the scene has been run on looks and shrugs. You might cheat a little closer to him in the reaction shot. But we won't get there for an hour.” His voice was calm and soft, softer than when he was yarning in the bar in fact. You got the idea that they could just sit there and talk things over until the ice bridge broke up and was carried away. “Well, let's read it through again just so we know where
we are.” And they did that. Then the cameraman came up to announce that everything was ready. Adela got up and went into the back of a truck, from which in a second I could hear typing. I felt hot breath on my ear, and, turning, I caught a big grin from Neil Furlong.

“Good morning, or I guess I should say, good afternoon. You were right, about Pye.”

“What time did she get back?”

“It wasn't much after ten. That Savas is a reasonable fellow. He said that Pye'd been a big help.” When you looked at Furlong up close, the smooth skin broke down into a map of fine lines whenever he smiled. We both watched the crew move around the camera. The grips hunched over their coffee when they could, or retreated to the generator van. One guy hunkered like a wrangler at a rodeo with a cigarette held between red fingers.

“In the old days,” Furlong said, “we'd have had to bring down a crew three times this size.” I made a gesture to show my interest. “We'd have needed a camera blimp to protect the sound track and a crew of four men to move each of the brutes.”

“Brutes?”

“The big lights. Four men each. Union rules. Lighting's changed in the last few years,” he added. His eyes were lazy triangles that looked half-shut as he squinted into the scene. “We get greater intensity now with lighter equipment. Film's faster too, doesn't need the set to be so hot—I mean bright.”

In silence we watch Peggy. She was now standing near the parapet with Sayre, who was talking to her steadily. Apart from occasional nods, she didn't show much animation. In fact she looked like a statue or a painting in a museum. She was wrapped in a studio blanket, under which she was wearing a mink coat over a long party dress of midnight blue. Her woollen mittens didn't go with the ensemble. She waved one of them in our direction when Sayre turned to hear from the assistant director. Then Adela rejoined the group at the parapet, delivering new pages of script to Sayre, who nodded thanks.

“Sayre owes that woman a lot,” Neil said to nobody in particular. He looked a little sheepish when he realized that he'd spoken his thought aloud. “She can put him back together blindfolded, the way a soldier can reassemble an automatic rifle. They've been married and divorced so often I don't think anybody knows what the official status is at the moment.”

“Can't get along without each other, eh?”

“That's the good side. Loyalty, absolute loyalty. She'd cut throats for him if necessary. She nursed him back to life three or four times and fought her way into a faddist health sanatorium once to drag him away from snake-oil cures and a daffy broad with a nice set of knockers.”

“Why aren't you writing the new lines?”

“Oh, that isn't writing, that's just blocking with words. The real writing is the conception that brings them out here in the first place. What the actors say is the least of it. It's a question of scene following
scene following scene. Within the scene, at this stage the writer stands clear. Nobody tells Jim A. Sayre where to put his camera.”

Behind me, I could hear a couple of the make-up boys sniggering. Furlong went to find out why, and came back smiling. “It's Williams. Every time he takes a poke from that flask of his, it goes right to his nose. Bluey, the make-up guy, says he's got it worked out to the ounce; so much drink equals so much pancake.”

To my left, a grip was spraying wax on a highlight reflecting the sun from a car's windshield. The spray didn't help, so he tore off a length of black masking tape and ran it along the bright spot. He made a wide enough patch so that the movements of the sun during the next half-hour wouldn't require the job to be done over again. Furlong saw me looking, and smiled, before walking back to the hotel. “So now you know what goes on behind the screen.”

Somebody yelled, “Quiet!
Ice Bridge
. Shot 51. Take 1.”

THIRTEEN

By two o'clock I had parked outside the chain-link fence of a school yard a few blocks from Centre Street. It was deserted except for a red cap stuck in the fence. The abandoned ice slide was grey and lonesome. So were the covered drinking fountain, the brick wall and the sky. I lit a cigarette and opened the car window to let the smoke escape. A huge icicle hung from the eaves of the school where it made an angle with the street. The cold hand of mid-winter was on the small of my back. In the glove compartment I found my Alekhine. I tried to remember when I played my last chess game. I flipped through the pages, not really taking anything in. Chess seemed a million miles away, where it was possible to build a strong centre and advance with more than hope.

I hardly knew Hayes. I'd just met him, only had one drunken conversation with him. There are probably lots of people more worthy of being alive than Hayes. Looking at Anton's sign I thought Martha Tracy had had the only useful idea in the whole case. Instead of waiting for Billie at the beauty parlour, I should be phoning her husband. That's what he's paying for. So, what's the big idea of me sitting here worrying about a murder that has nothing
to do with Billie Mason. Nobody killed Hayes because of Billie. Billie couldn't leave Hayes fast enough. The Hayes problem was some other can of trash, not the one I'd been paid to pick through. I put
My Best Games of Chess
back where I found it in the glove compartment.

Across the street and around the corner, a woman with blue hair under a kerchief was entering Anton's Salon. If the mink coat she was wearing was completely paid for, she could afford to have the hairdresser come to her. The large plate-glass window was steamed up and a couple of pictures showing hairstyles cut from
Vogue
and other fashion magazines were curling at the edges from the humidity. I couldn't make out more than rose and green shapes through the dripping glass, so I went in. An old-fashioned bell, like in a country general store, jangled as I closed the door behind me. It was now 2:30
P
.
M
.