Fade to White (23 page)

“I don’t know,” said Chip, shaking his head and narrowing his eyes. “I’m starting to settle on local. Local for a couple of generations anyhow.”

“No way.”

“Way. You’ll see.”

The old woman tapped on the microphone with one manicured nail, making a hard sound that startled everyone, including herself, into rapt attention.

Stacey looked around at the crowd, almost every face smiling up expectantly at the white-haired woman. She tilted her head toward Chip and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m having second thoughts,” she said.

“Too late.”

“How many generations does it take to make a local?”

The woman smiled, took a folded piece of paper from her pocket, and painstakingly flattened it on the surface before her.

“Around here?” Chip shrugged, and the white-haired woman at the podium began to speak. Her voice was low and large, doubly surprisingly for coming from such a small figure, and it had the most astonishing down-east accent imaginable. She sounded like a lobsterman. Chip gave Stacey the point of his elbow. “I’m thinking all the way back to the
Mayflower
,” he said.

*   *   *

It was a double feature:
Murder Town
, followed by
Lights Out.

The
Mayflower
lady, whose name was Druscilla Peru and whose people had come south to Vermont from a saltwater farm on the coast of Maine a hundred years back, and whose inheritance had funded not the film series itself but a lobbying effort to persuade the NEA to back it over the long term, apologized for the similarity of the two pictures but said that these were all the library could get on such short notice. They had hoped to contrast one of Stone’s classic crime movies with something different—
The Ne’er-Do-Wells,
maybe, or
Last Stand at Appomattox
—but facts were facts and they’d just have to make do.

Stacey looked around the crowd as the lights went down, and figured that about half of the people in the town hall looked as if they had plenty of experience making do. The rest, not so much. So she guessed Chip had been right. It was a little of both.

Murder Town,
first on the double bill, was the movie that established all the great themes of Harper Stone’s work. The alienated outsider. The corrupt society that requires his heroism but ultimately rejects him. And the outcast dame who wins his icy heart, if only for a while.

But if
Murder Town
set the tone for his career,
Lights Out
was his bare-knuckled masterpiece. The hero, a certain Harry Smith—for every one of Stone’s characters shared the actor’s initials and the three doomlike beats of his name—was jut-jawed and narrow-eyed and independent as a hog on ice. He was a private investigator, fifty bucks a day plus expenses, and if he felt a shred of compassion for the industrialist whose empire was saved by his quick wits or for the blackmailer who plummeted down that famous elevator shaft, he wasn’t letting on. Likewise for the industrialist’s daughter, played by some starlet whose career arc had peaked here and then plummeted. Steer clear, baby. Harry Smith was just doing his job. There’d be time for romance after the credits rolled.

“Ooh, I love this one,” Chip said when the titles came up over an animated graphic of a yellow flashlight beam prowling the cut-paper streets of a city straight out of some German expressionist’s nightmare. Lurking criminals ducked into alleyways at its sudden and illuminating touch. Cats scattered from high fences. “It’s my dad’s fave, too.”

“I thought you said he liked
Afraid of the Dark
best.”

“Did I say that?”

“You did. That’s what you told Stone. That day on the mountain?”

Somebody shushed the two of them from behind.

“Wow, good memory,” Chip whispered. “I think you’re right. I think he did like
Afraid of the Dark
best. But that was pretty much a remake of this one, wasn’t it? Only with a bigger budget? And Anne Bancroft, I think?”

“Maybe your dad goes for Anne Bancroft.”

“You could be on to something.”

The flashlight beam passed down an alley, slipped through an open door, and then disappeared, the whole scene going black on black for a few seconds to the accompaniment of a screeching trumpet. A few more beats and the trumpet stuttered out and a bass picked up the rhythm. The light appeared again from behind the windows of an upstairs room. Two windows, each framing the silhouette of one man. The men leveling pistols at each other. The bass thumped, steady and urgent. The flashlight beam flicked from one man to another and back again, and at last the guns fired in a coordinated explosion that washed out the black city and lit the upturned faces of a hundred or more spellbound Vermonters seated row upon row in folding chairs. One last blast of horns. Then,
Lights Out.

THIRTY-THREE

For certain people gathered in the town hall—the under-forty crowd, mainly, raised as they were on MTV—the movie was surprising talky and molasses-paced. How on earth Harper Stone ever got a reputation as a man of few words was anybody’s guess. It seemed to Stacey as if he were always explaining things: the plot, his motivations, the workings of a Ford Thunderbird Coupe or a Smith & Wesson .38 Special. There was no end to it.

The elevator scene, on the other hand, did not disappoint. To begin with, the angles were flat-out dizzying. The camera flicked up toward the gaping doorway on the top floor, down toward the filthy black roof of the cab, and over the edge to the dizzying drop below, exactly the way a panicked person would. Wobbling and shimmying. Pure cinematic vertigo. It made you feel as if you were right there in the shaft, hanging on to those greasy cables and breathing hard and clinging for your life. The editing was something special, too. This was where those long, lazy shots that drove the younger members of the audience crazy during the rest of the movie paid off. A single shot could last for half a minute, a minute, maybe more. The camera bobbed and swayed and tracked and never lost focus while Harper Stone and the soulless extortionist—Joseph Cotton, in a last-minute return to form after the years he’d wasted guesting on
The Rockford Files
and
Fantasy Island
—duked it out. Each endless shot was like a bad dream from which no escape was possible, and when it finally cut away things only got worse.

The whole crowd held its breath, although by now everybody on the planet knew that Harper Stone would come out smiling in the end. (Not smiling, really. The expression fixed on his face would be more in the line of a grimace. Still, whatever you called it, it was better than what was going to become of poor old Joseph Cotton.) The movie ended only a minute or two after Stone lost his grip and Cotton took his long and twisting fall, as if everybody involved in the making of it knew that it had nowhere to go from there but down. The critics said that Stone’s career should have ended there, too, right there on that unforgettable high point. But who in the world ever took that kind of advice?

When the lights came up and the applause died down—that was the power of an old picture like this one, it could still draw an audience to its feet just on general principles—Druscilla Peru approached the microphone again. But instead of thanking everyone for coming, talking up next week’s movie, and advising one and all to drive safely going home on these treacherous roads, she held up her index finger like a schoolmarm and said that she had a wonderful surprise for everyone. The crowd murmured, boots shifted on the hard floor, and without further ado she introduced an individual who had sat in the back all this time, admiring the movie from a certain very personal point of view and swelling with a little bit of unexpected pride when the crowd burst into applause at the end.

Manny Seville. She called him
Manfred,
the way his name read in the credits. Manfred R. Seville, technical director on the movie they’d just seen. Up from New York for a few days and generous enough to share his insights on the making of
Lights Out
with this roomful of poor unsophisticated country people. He rose to his feet amid a spontaneous roar of applause, and came to the podium beaming in spite of himself.

The first question came from an old-timer in khakis, a plaid shirt, and a fly-fishing vest, a self-professed film buff retired up here from New York, whose chief objective was to show off every single thing he knew or thought he knew about movies. He stood up, cleared his throat, and spoke in a high, wavering voice, starting with film grain and shutter speeds and low-light shooting, concluding eight or ten minutes later with his personal readings of the major films of Sergei Eisenstein. At no point along the way did he give any indication of what his question might have been, or even trouble himself to suggest that he actually might have one. Manny thanked him for his insights, calling him a shrewd observer of filmmaking technique, and the old man sat back down satisfied.

The next question was about Harper Stone. In fact, all of the remaining questions were about Harper Stone.

How well did Manny know him?

Very well indeed. They’d come up through the ranks side by side. They’d been kids together on the Warner’s lot, for Christ’s sake—if you could say “for Christ’s sake” in a nice place like this.

What about the
real
Harper Stone? What was he like?

He was a cast-iron sonofabitch, if they’d pardon his French. Hah hah hah. No, really, he was a gentleman. A true gentleman of the old school. No kidding. An absolute sweetheart.

Did Manny have an inside scoop on his death?

No. They’d been up here in the mountains working on a commercial, but they hadn’t had all that much to do with each other. Hadn’t even seen each other off the set.

Where did Harper Stone get that tattoo on his forearm? The one you could see just for a second or two during the elevator scene?
Frankly, he didn’t know. He didn’t even remember that the guy had
had
a tattoo, come to that. Maybe … oh, never mind.

Maybe what?

Maybe if the librarian hadn’t made off with the reels they could take another look at the film and he’d remember, but it was too late. What did it look like?

A heart, an anchor, chains.

Not a kitty in a sailor hat? Hah hah hah. Not Woody Woodpecker with a cigar? Was she positive?

No. It was a heart and an anchor, with chains wrapped around them. And it was there on the screen for just a second. Just a flash.

He scratched his head and said maybe it was makeup. Maybe since Stone was such a stickler about getting into his characters, he’d had somebody in the makeup department paint the thing on his arm just for that one shot.

Stacey didn’t think that sounded likely, but she thanked him and let it go.

*   *   *

“Pretty sharp eye there, Stacey.” Chip whacked the ice scraper against his pantleg, tossed it behind the driver’s seat, and slid back inside the Wrangler.

“The thing is,” she said as he slammed the door, “I’ve seen that tattoo before.” She rubbed the inside of the windshield with the back of her glove, sending down a little shower of ice crystals. They were going to have to sit in the car for a while and let it warm up before it was safe to move, especially given the pitch darkness of the roads between Woodstock and home. “And not just on Harper Stone, either. I’m sure of it.”

Chip blew on his window and rubbed at it with his forearm. “Where?”

“On Mr. Wonderful, over at the Slippery Slope.”

“Buddy.”

“Yeah. Buddy.”

“It’s a small world, I guess,” said Chip.

“I’ll say.” She sat shaking her head just a little.

“Then that’s that.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if the world is really
that
small.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” He goosed the accelerator a bit and the heater fan speeded up. Little patches of transparency were just beginning to melt through the fog at the bottom of the windshield.

“Meaning I think there’s a connection between the two of them. And not just the drug deal, either. I think that if Harper Stone’s history goes back with that Manny Seville, then it goes back even farther with Buddy Frommer.”

“All the way back to what? To some tattoo parlor in Singapore? Some fraternity prank?”

“It’s anybody’s guess.” She tried upping the knob on the fan but it was at the top already.

“I could see a hazing ritual, maybe. Although getting a tattoo seems like a big commitment.”

She nodded a few times, sitting there under the streetlamp, the outside world growing less and less vague as the windows defogged. Finally she turned to Chip and said, “Does either of them seem like a real joiner to you?”

“That’s hard to say. Were fraternities all that big back then, anyhow?”

“Huge. They were
huge.
”

“That’s a start.”

“And how long ago exactly is
back then?
I’d think Buddy’s maybe fifteen years younger than Stone.”

“Brothers don’t have to be in the fraternity at the same time.”

“I don’t know.” She still had him fixed in her gaze. “Neither of them looks like the kind of person who’d want to prop up a weak ego by joining a fraternity. Do you think?”

“You’ve got a point.” He goosed the engine again, keeping his foot down while the engine revved, and soon the windshield was nearly clear enough to drive. “Besides,” he said, “what fraternity would have Buddy Frommer?”

THIRTY-FOUR

Come morning, Stacey got a late start. She hadn’t even set her alarm. There wasn’t any rush. No significant snow had fallen since the big blizzard, and although conditions on the mountain were pretty good they weren’t great. On top of that it was the weekend, which meant that all of the flatlanders who’d put off coming when the snow was deep would be up now in droves.

Guy was pulling on his coat in the front hall when she came out into the kitchen. “Glad you’re up,” he said. “I thought you’d be interested to hear what the medical examiner had to say.”