Reckless Disregard (17 page)

He jerks his head back and drops the pipe, not bothering to pick it up.

“Let me see it,” he says.

I slide it over to him. He scowls at the piece of paper and slides the list back to me with aggression.

“Lighting and sound?” he says. “Sure, why not.”

“Why the lying?” I say.

His shoulders slump, and he sighs like a man accepting news of a serious illness. “Do you know that after the film was shut down, two of his goons showed up to search my apartment to make sure I didn’t have any copies? Frightened my girlfriend, tore up the place, and threatened to break my legs if they found out I had a copy. That’s why I lied to you and that’s why I won’t discuss that movie or McGrath or Bishop.”

“Who sent them?” I ask. “Bishop?”

He crosses his arms. “I won’t discuss it.”

“Did Felicity McGrath act in
The Boatman
?” I ask.

He just stares at me.

I blurt the next words out—a lawyer’s primal instinct. “Last time we were here, you said Felicity slept with many men in Hollywood. Did they include you?”

Ettinger raises his hand in denial, but there’s also a fleeting braggadocian glint in his eyes that answers my question in the affirmative.

Brenda goes to the other side of the table and sits beside him. “I know this is scary,” she says. “But we really need your help. Can you at least tell us whether Felicity acted in the movie?”

“I cannot,” he says.

“There’s another person we’re interested in,” I say. “The cast list says that an actor named Bradley Kelly was in
The Boatman
. Is that the same guy who started the Church of the Sanctified Assembly?”

Ettinger closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and nods. “Another reason why I won’t talk about it.”

Though I was certain that it was the same Kelly, Ettinger’s confirmation causes a glaucomatous fog to descend, one of the many symptoms of my courtroom stage fright. The late Bradley Kelly was the charismatic founder of the Sanctified Assembly, supposedly a divine prophet who traveled to a parallel universe and drank of the celestial fountain of all truth. He also seduced my mother and persuaded her to join his sham religion because she had business savvy that he didn’t. Through her, he got access to the money I earned as an actor. She dragged me into that world, and there I stayed until age fifteen, when I escaped the abuse and terror. After that, I became the Assembly’s sworn enemy. I’m still their enemy.

A young woman comes into the classroom and walks over to Ettinger. “I thought we had office hours, Professor. Did I get the time wrong?”

“No, Madison. You have the correct time. I unexpectedly got tied up. But I’m done with my meeting now. Let’s get some coffee and talk in the plaza.” He stands up and without saying good-bye escapes through the door.

“He isn’t only afraid of Bishop,” Brenda says. “He’s afraid of the cult.”

“He should be.”

She grabs my sleeve. “We’ll figure this out. I’ll find addresses or phone numbers for the people who worked on
The Boatman
. And we have Philip Paulsen, and he’s awesome.”

I nod. There’s something I haven’t told Brenda. It’s about another actor whose name appears on
The Boatman
cast list. His name appears on page 2, near the bottom:

Little Cupid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parky Gerald

Was I really in that movie as a four-year-old? Did I know Felicity McGrath?

As soon as Brenda and I leave the campus and get back into my car, we call Philip Paulsen on the speakerphone to update him on the day’s developments. He uncharacteristically loses his temper over Bishop’s Gestapo tactics. After we convince him that we’re OK, he says, “I’m down at the County Hall of Records. I’ve been looking at records the entire day.” His breathing is so labored that I’m certain he’s drenched in sweat from sitting in that stuffy old government building, where air-conditioning and adequate circulation are only aspirational. He would’ve been safer in the Macklin & Cherry archives.

“You’re working too hard,” I say. “Which is exactly what Joyce doesn’t want. What
I
don’t want.”

“I found something,” he says. “Felicity McGrath had a child.”

“Rumors were that she was pregnant,” I say. “We already knew that.”

“No. She bore the child two years before her disappearance.”

Brenda half squeals, half gasps. Because Philip delivered the news in his pastoral monotone, it takes me a moment to understand its significance. When it does, I swerve halfway into the other lane, earning a long, hostile honk from an affronted Audi. I pull over to the curb and cut the engine.

“Go ahead, Philip,” I say.

There’s the whoosh of his breathing on the other end of the line. “OK,” he says. “There’s a birth certificate for a baby girl named Alicia Courtney Turner, born December 21, 1985. Mother, Paula McGrath. Father, Samuel Turner. Unmarried.”

I shudder when I hear the middle name—the same as the cosplayer who believes she’s Felicity. I’d take it as another one of her make-believe games, except she couldn’t possibly know that Felicity had a daughter.

“The actor who played Rossiter in
Meadows of Deceit
?” I say. “Have we tried to find him?”

“We did and he’s dead,” Brenda says. “Died in 2005 of AIDS.”

“Why didn’t the media pick the birth up?” I say. “Or the cops?”

“The birth certificate was filed under seal,” Philip says.

“Whoa, that’s probably illegal,” I say.

“Someone had to have
mucho
clout to get it done,” Philip says. “Like our boy Bishop.”

“Bishop wasn’t that powerful in the mid-eighties,” I say. “I doubt he could—”

“Maybe his father?” Philip says.

It doesn’t seem likely that lawyer Howard Bishop had that kind of power. But it doesn’t seem likely that he could have quashed
The Boatman
, either, and Harry Cherry claims he did.

“How did you manage to get a copy?” I ask Philip.

“I have a connection,” he says. “That’s all you need to know. I’m going to do some looking for Alicia Turner.”

“Go home,” I say. “If not for yourself, for me. Joyce will kill me if you don’t take better care of yourself.”

“I’ll let you know what I find,” he says, and the connection goes dead.

“I’ll look on the Internet for this Alicia girl,” Brenda says once we’re back on the road. “She’s young, so maybe she’s on Facebook. Maybe she knows something about what happened to her mother.”

“If she even knows who her mother was,” I say.

Brighton slides the cursor across the screen and simultaneously presses the tilde key to cast a spell on a Komodo dragon that bears an uncanny resemblance to William Bishop. The giant lizard is wearing leather puttees and jodhpurs and is carrying an old-time movie director’s megaphone. Bugsy says he’s dressed like Cecil B. DeMille, whoever that is.

“Pause that thing,” Bugsy says.

Brighton hits the
pause
key.

“That damn game of yours,” Bugsy says in that perpetually stern voice that doesn’t necessarily reflect his true mood. “It resurrects the dead. Some things should be left alone.”

Brighton doesn’t understand Bugsy’s point, but he resumes playing the game, sensing that this will rile Bugsy up, which is perfectly OK because he’s learned that Bugsy likes nothing more than to be riled up. It gets him
pontificating
, the HF Queen says.

“In my day, there were sharp lines of demarcation between reality and illusion,” Bugsy says. “Novels and films were fantasy worlds where you went to escape reality, to laugh, to scream, to cry, to cogitate, to fantasize, all without consequence. Now what do you have? So-called ‘reality’ television, where you try to glorify your own existence by scoffing at someone else’s, never mind the observer effect, which means, because I’m sure you don’t know about quantum physics, that the very presence of the camera changes the reality so you’re not seeing reality at all. And then there’s your
Abduction!
game, supposedly pure illusion but seemingly affecting the world outside the screen in adverse ways. Although the logical theory is that this Poniard fellow is the murderer himself.”

Brighton doesn’t care what anyone says—Bugsy, the HF Queen, the bloggers, the media, anyone—Poniard isn’t a murderer. Brighton’s belief in his hero’s innocence is absolute, and it’s not just because he’s ten years old like Bugsy whispered to the HF Queen when
she
called Poniard a killer. No, Brighton knows Poniard through the video games, and as violent as they are, the games preach
non
violence, fairness, justice.

“What’re you guys up to?” the HF Queen says.

Brighton starts. He didn’t hear her come in. She’s always sneaking up on him lately. She’s still in her work dress, but she’s taken off her high heels and is barefoot.

“What else?” Bugsy says. “The kid’s brains are getting pickled in cyber-brine with this game.”

“You are the one who told me to let him play it,” she says.

“You should know better than to listen to me,” Bugsy says.

She leans over to look at the screen and rests her hand on Brighton’s shoulder. He hates when she does that, all the more so because her hand feels soft and firm at the same time.

“How’re we doing on this level, kiddo?” she asks.

Brighton shrugs. A man with coal-black hair and a Do-Right jaw kneels down in front of a fountain that spews an iridescent emerald-green liquid, clearly toxic because each time a drop splashes on the ground, there’s an angry sizzle, a billow of smoke, and a deep fissure where the liquid has landed. But then the kneeling man stands up, mugs for the camera, and smiles. He has gorgeous pure white teeth, so bright in fact, that capillaries of light beam off his incisors and bicuspids, a silly effect more worthy of a Saturday morning cartoon show than a Poniard masterpiece. He walks over to the lethal fountain, and though the waters engulf him, he’s unharmed. He clasps his hands in a kind of prayer position.
I am Cad Belly, the keeper of the Celestial Light
, he says.
We all must bathe in the healing waters of the Celestial Fount
.
The pure will be cleansed; the evil shall perish
.

“Seriously?” the HF Queen says.

“This Poniard fellow has some big
huevos
,” Bugsy says.

“No, he’s crazy,” the HF Queen says.

The Queen’s fingers tighten on his shoulder, but she doesn’t say anything else. Before she came home, Bugsy had taken one look at Cad Belly and started pontificating about the Church of the Sanctified Assembly, calling it a cult that worships money and celebrity and holds Bradley Kelly up as a divine prophet. He also said that the Assembly
isn’t beyond silencing its critics by any means necessary, if you know what I’m saying
. Of course Brighton knew what he was saying—Bugsy always sounds like a gangster.

On screen, Cad Belly takes a step toward the camera and spreads his arms, as if to embrace his congregation.
I am now sanctified, cleansed by the Fount. All ye are commanded to partake of the Fount or ye shall perish by it.
And suddenly, his face hardens into white granite, and his skin flashes neon reds and ambers and blues, and like a radioactive Bruce Banner he explodes out of his suit and pounds a fist on his now bare chest. He snarls and uses his perfect white teeth to tear a crease in the thin air as if it were a flimsy curtain, and he disappears into nowhere—an
alternate universe
, Bugsy calls it.

“They’re going to holler bloody blasphemy,” Bugsy says. “And this time, they’ll be right.”

The HF Queen shushes him. The Komodo C. B. DeMille appears and shouts, “Take One, Scene One! Action!” The words
STAGE FOUR: THE SKANKTIFIED ASSEMBLAGE
appear in mauve lettering on the screen.

Brighton tries to open the doors of a bejeweled cathedral, behind which scores of unfortunate men, women, and children are held captive in cells, chained and brainwashed by ruthless underbosses who all look like Cad Belly. (You can tell the prisoners are being brainwashed because the jailers use a chainsaw to open the prisoner’s skull, after which they remove the brain, dip it in soap suds, scrape it against an old-fashioned washboard, hang it on a clothesline, and put it back into the prisoner’s head. After that, the prisoner—now wearing a sign that says
devotee
—walks around in circles with a loopy smile and cow eyes.) The fingers of Brighton’s left hand fly over the keyboard, while his right hand makes impossible mouse turns, disintegrating guards and casting spells to unlock doors.

“The kid’s like a fucking Segovia on that thing,” Bugsy says.

“Language, Dad,” the HF Queen says, without taking her eyes off the screen.

Brighton likes the compliment, though he has no idea who Segovia is. Meanwhile, he never misses a keystroke. This is an easy level, another signature element of Poniard’s games. Rather than make the stages ever more difficult like most games, he mixes in easier levels. Brighton has read a few blogs claiming that Poniard is like a drug pusher, that he designs his games to ensure that even the mediocre player will get “high” once in a while and keep playing. In the end, Brighton liberates all of the Skanktified Assemblage’s prisoners.