Private Screening (32 page)

“You can't.” The words came quickly, rehearsed. “Fred and I are taking him—I don't want him near what's been on television.”

“He and I were planning on it, Marsh.…”

“Then tell
him
that,” she said flatly.

Lord heard her put the phone down, then say, “Tony wants to talk to you.”

“Daddy?” His son's voice fell off. “I told Mommy you were taking me.…”

Lord could envision his seven-year-old mumbling into the telephone, with Marcia close by. As too often lately, he found himself trying to guess in seconds the effect of some response on Christopher; he was at once afraid that Christopher would choose his mother, and that choosing him would make his son's life harder. “You really want to see it, right?”

“Well, Mikie says it's good—”

“Then you can tell me about it, okay? And don't forget to thank Fred.”

“Okay.”

Christopher's voice was muted. Lord wished that he could see his face. “I love you, Christopher.”

“Me too.”

“Then let me speak to your mom, all right?”

“Okay.” Another pause, then, “'Bye.”

“'Bye.”

“What is it?” Marcia snapped.

Lord leaned forward. “Two things. First, tell that idiot if he drives my son when he's stoned again I'll see you both in court. Second, I'm tired of watching you use Christopher. Next time I come over, don't make him stand on the porch with his suitcase like a fucking orphan.…”

“I don't want you in this house. For
any
reason.”

“Listen—”

Marcia hung up.

Lord sat back in his chair. “Jesus.”

Cass had busied herself with the Rolodex. Almost shyly, she looked up through wire-rimmed glasses. “Marcia puts him in the middle, huh.” She paused, then added, “And you're paying her too much for it.”

“I wanted to keep him in that house.” He shook his head. “Whatever else, Marcia's not a fool. The choices she gave me were intended to inflict pain.”

“You got joint custody for Jack Cole.…”

“Public trials may be my perverse idea of fun, but not for Christopher.” Lord put on his sportcoat. “Did I tell you that
People
wanted to do a piece on our divorce?”

Cass watched him. “I guess,” she said finally, “there's no way of knowing who called her that night.”

“No.” Lord found himself staring at the blank face of the television. “I blew it, that's all.”

They left in silence.

Standing by her car, Cass asked him, “How's Harry doing, anyhow?”

Lord shrugged. “Not great. Marty Shriver says he doesn't take much interest.”

“Give him time.” She dipped into the front seat, put her key in the ignition, then leaned back through the window.

“You're nervous, aren't you, Tony.”

“Uh-huh. For Damone, Alexis,
and
Stacy Tarrant. Phoenix wants more from her and Parnell than money—this remote broadcast thing he's trying goes way beyond that.”

“And you're not sure you can help her.”

Lord shoved both hands in his pockets. “She'll be under incredible strain, and the only real conversation we've had was on the witness stand, when I made her watch that film. It's hard to call that quality time.”

Cass winced. “I suppose not.”

“It's funny—I've stopped counting how many times in the last ten months some fool or another has asked me, What's Stacy Tarrant really like? As if I'd know.”

Cass was momentarily quiet. “She must
think
you can help her, Tony.” She gave a sudden crooked smile, then blew him a kiss. “Good luck,” she said, and drove away.

Now, flying to Los Angeles to meet Stacy, Lord listened as the men sitting in front of him discussed the kidnapping.

“I don't think this Phoenix can do it,” the first one was saying.

“This guy at work says he
can
,” the authoritative one answered, “but they'd need to have a satellite dish. You've seen them—on those TV trucks.”

The first man was more subdued. “I feel sorry for the Parnell woman. I mean, they already lost their kid.” He paused. “Maybe they'll just do a Patty Hearst number, then let her go.”

“No one's sure what this guy wants, though.”

“He'll say tonight, he promised. About the other one too—Stacy's boyfriend or whatever.”

“Yeah, look at
her
,” the first man mused. “Like I tell my kids when they get hot about some punk rocker—get famous, and end up screwed.”

The elderly woman next to Lord noticed his expression. “I feel so sorry for that girl,” she ventured. “She seemed like such a nice person somehow, though no one has really seen her since the trial. Of course, that must have been hard for her.”

Lord nodded. “I imagine it was,” he responded, and lasped into silence.

The woman kept watching him. “Excuse me,” she asked. “Don't I recognize you?”

Smiling, Lord shook his head. “I'd remember you.”

The woman looked pleased. Reaching into her purse, she pressed a Bible tract into his hands. “You seem like a nice person too,” she said. “This tells how we can all be saved.”

The moment stirred memories of his mother watching him at Mass, dubious but hopeful. Thanking her, Lord opened the pamphlet. For the rest of the flight he pretended to read it, still pondering how to give advice on something as wrenching as Damone's abduction to someone who no doubt despised him. Every so often, he flipped a page.

Deplaning, the woman grasped his sleeve. “God bless you.”

Lord smiled again. When she was out of sight, he slid the pamphlet into a wastebasket.

Though people noticed him, no reporters knew he was here. But the newsstands were filled with customers reading headlines. The afternoon paper used pictures of Stacy and Alexis to dramatize “The Tragic Lives of Two Women”; its photo of the bound and gagged Parnell was credited to SNI. Lord did not linger. Stacy had refused to postpone the last day of shooting; her limousine took him to Paragon Pictures.

Passing through the marble arch which had symbolized movies since he was Christopher's age, Lord saw reporters and photographers and fans waiting for Stacy. A clearly surprised security guard checked his name against a list, placed two phone calls, then gave him a slip of paper marked “Sound stage Twelve—Anthony Lord for Stacy Tarrant.”

Waiting for Lord, Stacy closed her eyes.

She sat alone in a canvas chair, preparing to reshoot her final scene. She could not get it right, could not believe in it. Voices and footsteps echoed through the giant sound stage: for an instant, what was happening to John Damone seemed more real than that she was here, an actress.

Her new career at least, she remembered with high-strung irony, she owed to Lord.

It had begun the night after he'd cross-examined her, as she sat like this with John in her suite at the Mark Hopkins, staring at nothing.

“It was like I was catatonic,” she had murmured to Damone. “Lord kept asking questions, and I heard myself answering.”

Damone lit a cigarette. “It was that film he showed you.”

“How could he do that?”

“You're nothing to him.” Damone sounded neither angry nor surprised. “Neither was Kilcannon. Lord likes to win.”

“Will he?” she asked.

“No.” Damone's eyes narrowed. “Not without help.”

She turned to him. “I can't go on like this, John. It's so pointless.…”

“Perform.” The word was so soft that it asked a question.

“I can't.”

He shrugged. “The longer you go—”

“
No
.” She stood. “I watched that slime murder him—I can't walk onstage again.”

“Are you afraid some psychopath will shoot you?”

Stacy hesitated. “I'm afraid of the second before that,” she answered. “When I know it's going to happen.”

He watched her, silent.

Finally, she sat again, glancing away. “It would be like walking on his grave.”

Damone bent to stub his cigarette. “And you still can't write.”

“I can write—all about absurd death for no reason.” She looked up at him. “I won't make money from it.”

Damone drifted to the wet bar and poured himself a drink.

Somehow, his quiet brought her close to tears. “Damn Lord,” she said.

Turning from her, Damone answered in a monotone. “The man I hired killed him, Stacy. Lord just brought it back.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, heard him swirling ice in his glass. “That question he asked me—about Carson buying the gun
before
I said I'd do the concert?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did Carson ask if you'd reserved a date, in case?”

“No.” Damone's voice was quiet again. “There was no need for Harry to know about it.”

When she opened her eyes, he still drank, with his face to the wall, pensive. “Mark Steinberg called,” he finally said. “He wants to see you.”

She remembered brushing back Jamie's hair. It took a moment to ask, “The director?”

“He doesn't mind that you've never acted.” Damone faced her. “Do you?”

She paused. “No—not tonight.”

Damone gazed at her, then the suite, and began packing. That night she flew back to Los Angeles.

The next morning, before dawn, the dream came for the first time.

It began without sound. She was onstage; raised up by the crowd, Carson suddenly aimed his revolver at her face. As she waited to be shot, Carson glanced past her, then nodded. In slow motion his arm moved away from her. The revolver seemed to jump in his hand; on the screen above them, she saw Jamie fall. When she turned, the curtain had closed, and they were alone. “But what does it mean?” Jamie asked, and then she awakened. For an instant, her waking was so blurred in the dark that she reached out to touch him.

In the days that followed, the dream came repeatedly. But Damone was at the trial; she could not talk of her dream to anyone, or explain it to herself.

A week later, returning from the trial, Damone gave her Steinberg's script.

They did not discuss her dream then, or what he had said in court—neither wanted to, though both knew that she had watched him. For the rest of Carson's trial she reviewed the script as if her life depended on it, scribbling notes in the margin and learning the shorthand for each camera shot, trying to imagine the film frame by frame.

The story was spare. After divorcing her husband, a young mother finds that she is dying. The ex-husband she despises will raise her daughter. Awkwardly, she tries to teach him to be a parent, until they achieve an understanding of each other, and themselves. The film ends with the mother sending her daughter to live with him.

The day after the verdict, Damone and Stacy met with Steinberg.

That morning, Steinberg had offered to cancel the meeting, without giving reasons. When Stacy declined, he drove out to her new retreat in Malibu. No one mentioned the trial or attempted small talk, nor did Steinberg look at Damone. “You've read the script,” he began.

Stacy nodded. “But I haven't acted since college.”

“You're not a twenty-year-old model, either.” His voice was matter-of-fact. “There's a lot I won't have to tell you.”

Stacy smiled at one corner of her mouth. “I'll sleep on it.”

The next morning, she told Steinberg she'd agree if the set were closed to the press. When filming began, she attacked her role with total concentration.

Part was insecurity; her costar was a Yale-trained actor. But Stacy used herself more ruthlessly than she had when singing. Reaching for a mother's feelings, she became so lost that sometimes silence hung over the set. To help her relax, Steinberg installed a piano in her trailer. This was her only music. Her life assumed a rhythm—studying the script, doing takes until Steinberg was satisfied, imagining the next scene. On weekends she wrote down ideas. It was the purest work she had ever done; she did not watch dailies, or care what happened to the film when it was finished.

It had been only yesterday—a few moments before she learned Damone had vanished—that Stacy realized what the film had meant to her.

She'd awakened before dawn, alone, as she had since Jamie was shot. Sitting up, she stared at the darkness; her dream had been the same.

Stacy made coffee and went to the deck.

It was part of the ritual; she no longer cried. Staring at the ocean, she let the espresso drift to her nostrils, subconscious sifting the dream.

The air was heavy and smelled of salt. In the first morning light, a runner traced the line where waves struck the sand. A hundred yards out, kelp in long strands undulated with the ebb and flow. When she glanced back down the beach, the runner had vanished.

Once more, the dream meant nothing. Only Carson might know, she thought—or Carson's lawyer.

Retreating, she went through her exercises. As always, they took thirty-five minutes; showering and washing her hair added forty. It was seven-fifty by the time she had dressed.

Like a prisoner, Stacy reflected, measuring out the weekend in time-killing habits. Restless, she phoned her driver. “Can you pick me up early?” she asked. “My meeting's not till ten, but I'd like to look at the lot when nobody's there.”

As he cruised it, revolver spoiling the line of his coat, Stacy leaned against the window.

The back lot of Paragon was quaint as the Cotswolds. It had sprung up in the twenties, when films were a cottage industry, and the buildings were modest white stucco. They passed a mock-Tudor house, built for Valentino beneath a gnarled and incongruous palm tree, a blithe juxtaposition which reminded her of the home she'd had to sell after Jamie's death, for security's sake. Then they reached a street of the 1920s.

Each detail was perfect. A billiard parlor; a gold-filigreed sign; ornate wooden balconies; a worn brick hotel with rococo lettering; chimneys and smokestacks at various heights; a wrought-iron stairway; stone pavements; a horse trough; gaslights. Block by block, a slum alley, Brooklyn neighborhood, frontier town, and field-stone mansion seemed remnants of an eclectic civilization that had recently vanished. Then the limousine turned the last corner and Stacy saw the scaffolding behind them. She was not sure why this depressed her.