Fade to White (11 page)

They rode in silence for a little while. Stacey thought he might be fixing to invite her to go out and get something for dinner, but then she changed her mind and decided he was waiting for her to invite him. Either way, neither of them spoke up. They rode on side by side, looking down at a few kids who were trying to kill themselves on the terrain park underneath the lift. Chip kept a professional eye on them, but Stacey just shook her head.

Chip began. “How about later on we—”

At last,
Stacey thought,
here it comes.

But he cut himself off in mid-sentence, wincing at the sight of a kid dropping off the edge of a rail and cracking the back of his head on the hard edge of it. Thank God for helmets. Still, Chip kept watching—turning around almost 180 degrees in the chair—and he didn’t resume what he’d been saying until the kid had stood up and shaken himself off. And even then Stacey had to jog his memory.

“You were saying? About later on?”

“Oh. Yeah. Right.” He straightened himself in the chair. “How about we get together after supper and do some
real
off-piste skiing?”

Hmm. So there was no dinner invitation after all. But that was fine, because the off-piste skiing invitation was plenty more interesting than mere food. She gave him a quizzical look. “Everything’s closed after supper, though. Everything closes at quarter of four.”

“Not everything. There’s a whole world out there, Stace.”

“Stacey.” Brian was the only one she’d ever let call her Stace, and she wished she hadn’t.

“There’s a whole world out there, Stacey. And there’s going to be a full moon to light it all up.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Not a cloud in the sky, either. Look at that. Not right now.”

“Enough with the meteorology. What are you talking about
doing?”

The lift station was getting closer. They lifted the bar, tightened their grip on their poles, and raised the tips of their skis. “You’ve got to plan ahead for night skiing, is all. You’ve got to watch the weather. Especially if you’re going for those huge stashes of powder underneath the power lines.” He pointed with his poles as they slid down the ramp. Stacey followed their angle, past the abandoned fire tower, up over the trees, to the spot where a line of transmission towers stalked over the mountains like giant robots from another planet. She’d seen them from town a million times but had never noticed them from here. It had never occurred to her that you might reach them, much less get over there and use the bare swath of land under them as your own personal, untouched, pristine, virginal ski slope.

“You’re on, pal,” she said. “Oh, you are
so
on.” She stood gazing up in wonder, and before she knew what she was saying she had asked him to have a quick bite to eat beforehand. Or maybe afterward. Whatever.

How was he supposed to refuse? So now dinner was on, too.

*   *   *

“Hey, Sheriff.” The counterman, in shirtsleeves and a white apron, was working on his second or third cigarette. He turned to see Guy and Manny come out, both of them just as underdressed for the temperature as he was.

“Hey, Earl.”

“You need something? Can I—?”

“Nope. Mr. Seville, here, just thought he might like to grab a smoke.”

“Right. Gotcha.”

Manny fired up.

“You need anything, though—”

“Thanks. We’re covered.”

The sky was bright and blue and cloudless, and they stood in a line against the plate-glass window looking at it. They couldn’t see the runs from here, but every now and then a car passed and turned up the access road to the mountain.

Manny sucked on his cigarette and blew smoke from the corner of his mouth. “You got someplace else to be?” he asked Guy.

“It doesn’t look to me like a heavy crime day.”

“You never know.”

“How about you, Earl?” Guy turned to the counterman. “You seen any criminal activity this morning? Anybody suspicious lurking around the place?”

The counterman just laughed, blowing smoke.

Guy turned back to Manny. “I’ll have you know that Earl, here, is one of my top informants. So I guess I’ve got a little time on my hands after all.”

Earl laughed, then shouldered the door open and went back inside, saying he had to use the john.

When they were alone again, Guy cleared his throat against the cold and without turning his head to Manny said right out, “So he’s a schmuck, huh?”

“Earl?” said Manny. “That guy runs the place?”

“Not Earl, no. And Earl doesn’t run the place. He just runs the counter, five days a week. Kind of like you and the commercial.”

“Ah.”

“I’m talking about Harper Stone. You said he was a schmuck.”

“I did.”

“How would you mean that?”

“Hey,” Manny said, “is this an interrogation? It’s no crime not liking a person.”

“I know that,” said Guy. “I know that full well.”

“So is this an interrogation?”

“I don’t think so,” said Guy. “Does it seem like an interrogation to you? I’m just trying to learn everything I can about Harper Stone, and right now you’re the best source of information I’ve got.” He watched Manny grind out his cigarette on the concrete, and kept watching him until Manny got self-conscious and picked up the butt, making sure it was cold before putting it into the trash can. Some people needed law enforcement coverage all the time. “That’s kind of a shame, don’t you think?”

“What?”

“That you’re the best source I’ve got. A guy comes to a strange town where he has no friends or family or anything, and he disappears off the face of the earth. Leaving a guy like you—a business associate who knew him for what, maybe a long weekend?—the only one I can talk to about him.”

“There’s Brian.”

“There’s Brian. Right. Right you are.”

“Besides, everybody knows Harper Stone.”

“Not everybody,” said Guy, thinking of Stacey. “To tell you the truth, I’m afraid that the days when Harper Stone was on everybody’s radar are long gone.”

“You sound like his manager.”

“Do you mean that? You know his manager?”

“Sure.”

“So you two go back a ways. Or is that something else I don’t understand about your business? You all know each other.”

Manny said no, that was right. He’d known Stone for a lot longer than the weekend.

“No wonder you’re so confident about what kind of person he is.”

A spotless black Audi pulled up and two men in business suits got out. They came across the lot toward the coffee shop and greeted Guy, who swung the door open and pointed out that Earl might still be in the men’s room. They’d have to wait for a second. That seemed fine with them.

“Look,” Manny said, “I’m beginning to be sorry I ever said anything negative about the guy. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Don’t be. Other people—people who maybe just ran into him in town, is all—other people said he was kind of a queer guy, too.”

“Not like that. He wasn’t—”

“I don’t mean
queer
queer.”

“Right.”

“I mean the kind of guy who might look you in the eye and not even notice you.”

“Aha,” said Manny. “That’s him, all right.” He lit another cigarette. “That’s Harper Stone all over.”

“You think maybe it’s just ego?”

“Sure. If by ‘ego’ you mean
cocaine
.”

Guy looked shocked. “No,” he said. And then, “Really?”

“Really.”

“I’ll be. I thought that stuff appealed to a younger crowd.”

“There’s younger and there’s younger. You can be younger than Stone and still be in the nursing home.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Which is his whole problem.”

“Really?”

“Sure. The guy’s a has-been. Washed up. That’s got to be hard to take, after you’ve been on top.”

Guy bit the inside of his lip and nodded, watching a couple of cars turn up the access road to the mountain. When he’d processed everything, he said, “If you don’t mind my asking, tell me how far back you two guys go.”

SEVENTEEN

Manny Seville and the former movie star went almost all the way back to when Harper Stone’s name was neither Harper nor Stone. In fact, on the day they’d first sat down on the concrete steps in front of his seedy Hollywood apartment to watch the girls go by and share a couple of beers and a pack of cigarettes, the mailman had handed Stone a stack of junk and bills and said, “Nothing here from Otto Preminger, Mr. Schwartzmann. Better luck tomorrow.”

The incipient movie star flashed his teeth at the mailman and said, “Very funny, very funny.”

The mailman seemed to think it was, since he kept laughing all the way up the steps. He was still laughing as he opened the door and went in to distribute the mail, and was at it still when he came back out and walked down the street.

Once he was out of earshot, Manny tipped his bottle back and swallowed. “Mister Schwartzmann?”

“So I haven’t had a chance to get legal. Sue me.”

Manny grabbed an envelope. “Howard?”

“You never heard of a stage name?”

“Howard Schwartzmann?”

“You know what John Wayne’s real name is? Marion. Marion Morrison. And that Cary Grant? He used to be Archibald Leach, until he got wise.” He drained his beer. “
Marion. Archibald.
So don’t start making fun of your friend Howard.” He set the bottle down on the step beside him. “And never,
ever,
let on that you know.”

“Of course not.”

“Or you’re a dead man.”

“Of course not,
Howie.
” Manny made his eyebrows jump.

“My mother calls me Howie. Don’t you.”

“Fine. The whole thing’ll be our little secret.”

The two of them had known each other for six months or so. They worked together on the back lot at Warner’s, two chumps from nowhere trying to break into the movie business. In Manny’s case, “nowhere” was the Bronx. In Schwartzmann’s, it was some county in Nebraska where the grass grew high and the sun hung higher still, and there was nothing within a thousand miles to interest a big dreamer like him. How his parents had landed there he would never know. They would stay there forever, his mother calling once a week to beg him to come home, his father slipping a few bucks into an envelope every month and mailing it off to this apartment building either to keep him going or to keep him gone. It didn’t matter which. Even when he finally got legal with his new identity, Stone didn’t tell his father and the envelopes kept coming—addressed to his former self. How could you cut that off? So what if it meant the end of the noble Schwartzmann line? There was no reason for his old man to be the wiser.

The two of them were runners on the back lot, errand boys in the grand tradition. Manny wanted technical work and he was getting closer to corralling some of it. He sucked up to every assistant director and lighting guy and cameraman he ran across, and a couple of them were starting to recognize him. It was a start. Stone had bigger ideas, of course. He wanted to be a movie star, and at the moment he figured the best way to do that was to stage a performance every day as the very best errand boy in the whole wide world. The smartest, the sharpest, the handsomest, the best-natured, and the most efficient. As a result he was getting a reputation as a real first-class errand boy, while Manny was on the verge of stepping up in the business.

*   *   *

“So what was it?” Guy asked. “You loan him money or what?”

“Worse than that,” Manny said. He pursed his lips around his cigarette and stood there looking as if he wanted to suck the whole thing right down into his lungs. Like that would put an end to something.

“Worse than money?”

Manny dragged on the cigarette, took it from between his lips, and scrubbed it out against the heel of his boot. He took a step forward and tossed the butt into the trash can, then stood there in the entryway breathing out smoke, letting it out so slowly and over such a long period that it seemed as if something inside of him might have caught fire. “Worse,” he said finally, not looking at Guy. “It wasn’t money. It was a girl.”

“A girl.”

“Only you don’t loan a girl. And a person like Harper Stone, he isn’t much on giving them back when he’s done.”

“I gather that his star was finally beginning to rise,” Guy said.

“Not with me it wasn’t,” said Manny, still rueful after all these years.

*   *   *

Stacey and Chip had ended up taking a late lunch—if you could call a cup of lukewarm tea and a squashed granola bar “lunch,” which she certainly did—after the crowds had returned to the slopes and the cafeteria had emptied out. That meant they could put off supper until after they’d skied the power lines. In the mountains the sun went down around quarter to four, and it would be fully dark by five. All they’d have would be the moon, plus a couple of headlamps that Chip kept in his backpack. But that would be all they’d need.

“Let’s see,” he said as he took off his boots in the Patrol shack at the bottom of the mountain. “We’ve got two choices. If you want to do it the hard way, we can skin all the way up and ski back down. Or else we can spot a car at the top and the bottom.”

“If we drive,” Stacey said, thinking, “do you think we could ski it more than once?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Then never mind the hard way.”

“I second that.”

“But how do we drive up there?”

“There’s an access road around the back side of the mountain. Goes to this cabin? All set up with a windmill and solar and everything? Real off-the-grid stuff, about three-quarters of the way up to the peak. Pioneers.”

“You sure it’s plowed?”

“I think the guy who lives there works over in Rutland someplace. I see him around. He comes and goes all the time. We’ll leave your car down where the power lines come into town, there by the park, and we’ll take mine up past the cabin as far as we can get. Climb up the rest of the way, and we’re in business.”

“Have you done this before?”

“I’ve thought about it plenty.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

*   *   *

They met in the park around seven, their cars loaded up with heavier and warmer gear than they’d have worn in the sunshine. Nothing on earth was much colder than night skiing, moonlit or otherwise. People around here didn’t do it much. None of the Vermont mountains offered it on a commercial basis. There was no market for it, at least not among the sane. You had to go south into New York if you wanted that kind of thing, down to the Catskills where the slopes were so crowded you felt like a sardine. Or all the way to the sorrowful Poconos of Pennsylvania.