KW 09:Shot on Location (9 page)

21.

“Feeling better?”

“Depends. You bring more chocolates?”

“You ate the other ones already?”

“Some I ate, some I gave to people. People are nice here. Treat me like I matter. I could almost get used to it.”

Producing a package from behind his back, Jake said, “Then it’s a good thing I brought a bigger box today.”

Donna squirmed against her pillows, managed to lean forward for a closer look. She no longer winced every time she moved, though the trapeze from which her arm was still suspended squeaked like a hamster wheel from even the smallest motion.

“Your eyes look much better,” Jake said. “Still on pain pills?”

“Stopped ’em this morning. Waste of good drugs. Plus I don’t like feeling dopey. Where’s Claire? Back to shooting?”

Jake acknowledged that she was.

“Well,” said Donna, “the show must go on and all that happy horseshit. Let’s see those chocolates.”

He handed her the box. With her one good hand she joyfully but ineffectively clawed at the ribbon and the foil. “Fuck. I can’t get it open. Help me.”

He leaned in close, smelled the austere hospital soap with which she’d been bathed. She looked at the extravagant chocolates and said, “Wow. Are you trying to get me into bed?”

Jake said, “You’re in bed already.”

“Okay, okay. So you don’t want to answer the question.” She picked up a truffle and bit into it. “I guess Claire’s more your type anyway.”

“Let’s not even go there.”

“She’s smart. Successful. Classy.”

“All true. And she’s a colleague. That’s all.”

“Colleague
,” Donna mimicked, giving it a very hoity-toity sound. “I love that word. So respectable. So serious. Like you can’t fuck someone because she’s a colleague?”

Jake laughed. “You do have a gift for the profane.”

Donna rolled right along. “Now, I wouldn’t know. About
colleagues
, I mean. I don’t have
colleagues
, just knuckleheads I work with. But I’ve heard rumors that people poke their colleagues all the time.”

Jake popped another
bonbon
into her mouth to get her off the subject. Then he pulled over a chair and sat down at the bedside. “Donna, listen, there’s something I want to talk with you about.”

She heard the change in his tone, seemed to have anticipated it, in fact, and wherever he was going she didn’t want to follow. Lightly, she said, “Uh-oh.”

Jake chose not to be deflected. “I know who took your script. And I’m guessing you know it too.”

Donna settled back on her pillow and turned her face away. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Why not?”

She didn’t answer.

Jake went on. “His name is Ace. He’s your former boyfriend. You used to fight a lot and he’d make threats. I think he’s from Miami.”

Donna said, “You trying to play detective or something? How you know all that?”

“Doesn’t matter how I know it. But what I’m wondering is why this guy would want your script.”

“Who knows? Maybe he’s auditioning. Everybody wants to be on TV, right?”

“Donna, please, I’m serious. Here’s what I’m wondering. Maybe he wanted to know when they’d be shooting what. When you’d be in the water.”

“That isn’t in the script,” she said. She was silent for a moment, then turned her head slightly away and added very softly, “It’s in something called the one-line.”

Jake arced an arm around her pillow, tried to coax her eyes back toward him. “And was the one-line also in your notebook?”

She didn’t answer and she didn’t let her head be turned.

Jake said, “So he knew the shooting schedule.”

Grudgingly she said, “Lots of people know the schedule.”

“But lots of people haven’t threatened you,” said Jake. “Have they?”

“Ace wouldn’t do this to me,” she said.

“Someone did.”

“He doesn’t have a speedboat.”

“He could get one. Anybody could.”

Donna was silent for a moment, looking at nothing. Then her eyes swept right past Jake toward the box of chocolates. She reached for one but he pulled the box away.

“Don’t you want to know who did this to you? Don’t you even care?”

“What’s the difference who did it? It’s done. It’s over. Give me the fucking chocolates.”

He held them out of reach. “Why are you protecting him?”

Donna fell back on the pillow and gave her head a shake. She threw Jake a look that was equal parts fondness and exasperation. “You’re an idiot,” she said. “A classic case of a brainy guy who’s really, really clueless.”

He absorbed the comment, said nothing.

Leaning forward as far as she could manage, she went on, “I’m not protecting him, you jerk. I’m protecting you.”

He put the candy down where she could reach it. “Me?”

“Look, Jake, you’re a nice person. You hang around with other nice people.
Colleagues.
There’s a lot of stuff you just don’t get. Ace, I tell myself he means well or at least meant well once upon a time, but the people he hangs with, works with, they steal cars, break knees, set things on fire. They’re gangsters and bullies and that’s what he seems to be becoming, too. You don’t want to mess around with him.”

Out of his depth, Jake said nothing.

Donna went on. “So why was I with him in the first place? That’s what you’re thinking, right? Well, I know what Dr. Phil would say: low self-esteem. Might be something to it. When I started in with Ace, what was I? High school dropout whose best subject was gymnastics. Dopey girl trying to take some acting classes. Who did I expect to be with, Barack Obama?”

She reached for a candy, pulled her hand back.

“But it wasn’t only that. His group, his world, it excited me. For a while. I admit it. Champagne, hundred dollar bills. Plus I told myself the usual bullshit — he wasn’t like the others, there was something gentle, something good deep down. The crazy part is that I still believe that. I really do.” She shifted in bed and the arm-trapeze squeaked. “Okay, half-believe it.”

Jake said, “I want to find him.”

“You’re crazy. Forget it.”

“What’s his last name?”

“You think I’m going to tell you? Give it up.”

“I want to find out why he did this.”

“Why? Come on, that would be the easy part. To Ace, you’re either winning or you’re losing. I dumped him, I threw him out. At that point he was losing. Now maybe he’s the one that hurt me. He’s winning again. So let’s let it stay right there. He wins. Game over.”

Jake shook his head so vigorously that his hair rose up above his ears. “No, that isn’t good enough.”

“For me it is.”

“For me it isn’t. Look, you can’t have a world where people go around running each other over with speedboats and getting away with it.”

“You can’t? Except you do. Welcome to south Florida.”

“But even here —”

“Even here, what? Listen, does it strike you as strange at all that the cops have shown like zero interest in what happened?”

Fumbling for an explanation, Jake said, “No one got a good look at the boat. They couldn’t identify it.”

“Or maybe they could,” said Donna. “Maybe they know whose boat it was and they don’t want to touch it. That ever occur to you?”

To Jake in his innocence it hadn’t.

“The guy Ace works for, he’s a powerful guy,” she went on. “Ships stolen cars to South America. Turns the proceeds into drugs. Does loansharking. Has an arson and insurance racket. Spreads lots of money around. The cops leave him alone and Christ knows you should too.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jake, just stop! I’m not telling you his name and I don’t want you getting involved.”

Quietly but stubbornly, Jake said, “I’ll find out who he is.”

“Great, Sherlock. Do that. Then what? You start poking around and you end up in the hospital. Is that really what you want?”

She fixed him with a ferocious look but it was the word
hospital
that really got to him, imparted a queasy reality to the conversation, gave it the sour yellow smell of gore and the grinding texture of ripped ligaments and shattered bone. Playing off Jake’s flustered silence, she pressed on. “Listen, I’m getting out of here tomorrow. Having some nice paid vacation. By next week I’ll be doing physio. By next month I’ll be good as new. No problemo. Like this fucking little mishap never happened. So will you please just leave it there?”

He thought about it for a moment, saw the bulge in her side where her wound was dressed, heard the little hamster-wheel squeak of the swing from which her arm was suspended. Then he said, “No. I’m sorry but I can’t. I can’t just leave it there.”

22.

Riding a taxi back to town, Jake found Joey Goldman’s business card in his wallet and called him up. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, he said, “Joey, I have kind of a strange question for you. I’m trying to find somebody. Or somebody’s name at least. Donna’s old boyfriend’s boss. I think he’s some kind of gangster in Miami.”

Not exactly defensively but certainly not without a bit of caution, Joey said, “What makes you think I’d know?”

With equal discretion, Jake said, “You just seem to know what’s what down here. And your old friend Bert —”

“You trying to play detective or something?”

“No. Maybe. Sort of.”

“So who is this guy you’re looking for?”

“Some bigshot. Ships stolen cars, burns down buildings —”

Joey cut him off. “Whoa, whoa. You don’t talk about shit like this on the telephone. That’s pretty basic, Jake.”

“Sorry. I’m learning as I go along.”

“You had lunch yet?”

Jake said that he hadn’t. He hadn’t even noticed it was lunchtime.

“Meet me at the Eclipse Saloon. You know the place?”

Jake said that he didn’t.

“Simonton Street. Ask any local. See you there in half an hour.”

---

On the set of
Adrift,
Claire and Jacqueline Mayfield, the publicist, were standing on the periphery, witnessing what had been a rather sluggish and out-of-rhythm morning, rather like the first day back at school after a long vacation. Even though only a single day of shooting had been skipped, a certain momentum had been lost, the flow interrupted. Actors had a tough time finding their tone, honing their gestures, recapturing the attitudes they’d seemed to have mastered weeks before. Take after take was shot and discarded or just hacked off at some failed point in the middle.

It didn’t help that Candace McBride kept muffing her lines.

Now and then she missed a cue. Once she skipped a speech ahead so that the conversation made no sense. Other times she faked it, just plain guessing at what her line might be. Once or twice she opened her mouth and nothing came out.

Finally, having yelled
Cut
for what seemed to him the hundredth time that day, the director gave vent to his exasperation. He stormed over to his diva, holding some papers high above his head and waving them in a quick tight circle.

“Candace, my dear, you see these pages? Collectively, they are called a script. The script is made of words. Your job is to memorize those words and speak them in a certain predetermined sequence with your fellow actors. Can you try to do that for me, Candace? Please?”

At that point Candace lost it.

Her losing it was not especially surprising. It happened often. But even by the star’s high standards this was a spectacular meltdown. She snarled, she flared her nostrils, she balled her fists and stamped her feet. She hissed and mocked, but what was different about this outburst was that it seemed aimed not just at the director who’d dared to scold her, but at everyone around her. “Listen, you little asshole,” she began, “you count for nothing, there are ten thousand hungry little B-listers who could do your job, and I am carrying this show. That’s right, carrying it. On the screen and now in all these fucking interviews. I’m the one that people want to see. I’m up at fucking dawn, working at midnight, shilling my guts out while the rest of you are … what? Eating lobsters, chasing little boys? You don’t know the strain I’m under. I barely had time to look at the piece of shit script, let alone memorize it. You can all go straight to hell for all I care.”

And she bolted through the mangroves and the palm trees toward her tent.

For a moment no one breathed. Jacqueline Mayfield said very softly to Claire, “Christ, I’ve created a monster.”

“No,” Claire said. “She was a monster already. But you’ve definitely made it worse.”

---

“Sounds like Charlie Ponte,” Bert was saying. “Don’t you think it sounds like Charlie Ponte?”

“Hey, you’re the maven,” Joey said, “but yeah, to me it sounds like Ponte.”

Jake said nothing, just swiveled his head from one of them to the other and thought about the name. The syllables alone seemed a little frightening. Charlie Ponte. The hard consonants, the curt rhythm; it sounded like something being beaten with a pipe.

They were sitting at the bar at the Eclipse Saloon, near a wall festooned with dead mounted sailfish and tarpon, eating grouper sandwiches that leaked slivers of onion and bits of mushroom from the edges of the roll. They’d chosen the bar rather than a table so Bert could sneak in his dog. Dogs were not allowed but Bert had snuck his in for as long as anybody could remember. Everybody knew the dog was there, nestled in Bert’s lap beneath the overhanging padded lip of the bar; nobody seemed to care.

“Course,” the old man resumed, “just saying that it’s Ponte, what the fuck does that do for us? It’s not like we could just drop by or call him up.”

“Why not?” said Jake.

“Why not?” echoed Bert. He seemed to find the question funny. He shared it with the dog. “Ya hear that, Giovanni? Our friend here wants to know why not.” To Jake he said, “Just isn’t how it’s done. Ponte, he’s old school. You want to talk to him, you set up a meet. Which isn’t easy. Has so many bodyguards, his bodyguards have bodyguards. You talk to this guy, that guy, maybe eventually you get to Ponte. And after all that, why should Ponte give a shit?”

Jake said, “If he’s so old school, he probably wouldn’t approve of one of his guys running over an innocent woman with a boat. There’s rules, right?”

“That’s a point,” Bert said. “There’s rules. If anybody follows ’em anymore.”

Joey put his sandwich down and fastidiously wiped his fingers on a paper napkin. “Can we please back up a step? You don’t know for sure that the boyfriend did it. If he did do it, he’s not gonna appreciate you snooping around. And who’s Ponte gonna side with — a guy who’s been loyal to him or someone he doesn’t know from Adam?”

Bert thoughtfully stroked the chihuahua in his lap. “That’s also a point.”

Jake said, “I just want to find out if he did it.”

Joey said, “Okay. Fine. Then what?”

For that Jake had no answer. The simple truth was that he hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“You see, this is exactly the problem,” Joey went on. “This is why this whole thing is a very bad idea. You can’t just
find out.
You find out and then you’re supposed to
do
something. And there’s no good choices for what you’d do. You make a stink with Ace, he breaks your legs. You go to the cops, Ponte has you whacked. These are not good options.”

With a steadfastness that surprised himself, Jake said, “I’ll figure something out.”

Off the beat, two-thirds of a moment later, Bert murmured, “Guy has balls. I didn’t think he did but he does.” He seemed to be saying it to the dog, to the fish on the walls, possibly to Joey, to everyone except Jake.

Joey took one more shot at talking Jake out of it. “Something like this, you start it, at some point you can’t control it anymore.”

Jake silently held his ground.

Out of rhythm but firmly, Bert said, “You want me to, I’ll try setting up a meet. Might take a day or two. You mind driving to Miami?”