The Bones (34 page)

Stacy was going to be entitled to half of his Lynx money, but that number would shrivel like a garden slug in a salt bath
if Lloyd could bring himself to go through with this plan. But could he do it? Did he have the internal strength to break
out of his marital constraints, leaving his wife of ten years and his son, not to mention a comfortable home, familiarity
itself, for a seat in the theater of the mysterious? Could Lloyd Melnick, who, despite his pretensions to the contrary, has
led a remarkably placid life, depart from the known world and sail toward the shimmering horizon?

Lloyd walks past Jacy Pingree, who is on the lot for a costume fitting.

"Hey, Lloyd!" she chirps.

"Hey," he responds distractedly, barely looking at her.

I'm going to quit. Now is the time to take a stand. Harvey is handing me a perfect opportunity. But what'll Stacy say? She'll
have a stroke. She won't accept the price for marrying an artist. Wait a minute. I'm not an artist. I've been trying to write
that book for months now and nothing's coming. Nothing's coming because I've been working on this ridiculous show. With the
show out of the way I'm going to get into a groove. lean see the groove and lean see me in it. Can I tell Stacy I'm writing
a book? Why am I so worried what she thinks? I should just move out. I can't move out. What about Dustin? He may be a pain
now but that's because he spends too much time with his mother. She's ruining him. He's going to improve, I'm going to make
sure of it, and I need to be there when that happens. That's why they have visitation. Am I going to be one of those divorced
dads? Those guys are so pathetic. But, Jesus, once they stop being depressed, they have much more sex. Stacy doesn't support
my goals. Hemingway was married four times. What am I so afraid of? I have the talent. No, I don't. It's time to stop kidding
myself. I have to have faith.

When Lloyd gets back to the office, he tells Tai Chi he is taking the rest of the day off. She asks him if he's feeling alright
and he duly lies that he's never felt better.

On the ride home Lloyd is too distracted to turn the radio on. Instead, he thinks about Phil Sheldon and what he would do
in this situation. He would certainly not accept this degree of interference. He would yell and scream and threaten and maybe
punch his hand through a wall for good measure, all of which contributed to his mystique. That Phil Sheldon had precious little
mystique prior to being party to the accumulation of a billion dollars in syndication profits is of little concern to Lloyd
right now because these days Phil had mystique to burn.

Then he thought about Frank and the Zapruder-film screen saver on his computer. Frank had mystique, too, and his was increasing
by the minute. A man with the Zapruder film as his screen saver would not roil over for Harvey Gornish, Lloyd forgetting Frank
had done exactly that when he'd signed on to
Kirkuk.
If Lloyd aspired to a better place ("Than Brentwood?" Stacy would say, eyebrows lifted), if he thought he was a man whose
ragged dreams could be taken and, like scrap metal, heated and pushed and tugged and coaxed into something finer than base
elements late of the earth's heart, now was the time.

Stacy looks as if she might be having a heart attack. She has stopped breathing. A spoonful of minestrone is frozen halfway
to her gaping mouth. Lloyd has taken her to dinner at Del Olio, an Italian restaurant in Venice where a bowl of linguine costs
twenty-five dollars.

"I didn't say I was doing it," Lloyd nervously reassures her, concerned she might keel over right there. "I said I'm thinking
about it." Already he's backpedaling, his resolve starting to wither in the gathering storm of her disapproval.

Stacy takes a couple of deep breaths to restore her equilibrium, her eyes staring straight ahead. When she returns her gaze
to Lloyd, it is with the intensity of a lion tamer. "Under no circumstances can you quit. So they want you to use another
actress. What's the big deal?"

"Honey Call?"

"What wrong with her?"

"Well, for starters, you can't stand her. You said so. After you met her you said she was disgusting and she made you want
to take a shower."

"I don't have to hang out with her, and if I see her at the wrap party, I'll be nice."

He thought Stacy's disapproval of Honey might work on his behalf, but clearly, the prospective proximity of an actress whose
sexual availability to a likely employer was something Stacy took for granted is easily trumped in her cunning mind by the
economics of the situation. To Stacy's thinking, as long as he was discreet about it and her life remained unchanged, Lloyd
could go to Sea World and take up with a porpoise.

"I don't think I can do it," he says without much conviction. "It completely goes against my vision of the show."

"Your
vision?"
Stacy snorts with amusement at his highfalutin word choice and the arty-fartiness it implies. "What vision? You're a television
comedy writer, Lloyd. And you're a really a good one so don't worry about visions."

"You don't think I have a vision?" he says, feeling idiotic as the words come tumbling out of his mouth, in some ridiculous
cross between Willam Blake and Ralph Kramden,
You don't think I have a vision, Alice? Well, let me tell you something, I have a vision! Bang! Zoom! O Jerusalem!

She interrupts his reverie saying, "Are you Phil Sheldon all of a sudden with the vision?" This lands like an ax and cleaves
him in two. His fear of her response to his plan turns slowly into antipathy toward her, mixed with the insecurity he perpetually
cultivates with respect to his creative powers. "Since when are you such a sensitive flower, Lloyd? They put your show on
the air, and if they're not canceling it, you're, like, I don't know, obligated? You have to make it work." She lowers her
eyes, boring in. "Don't even think about quitting."

"Or what?" he asks, correctly perceiving he's being threatened, although with what he's not exactly sure. When Stacy does
not respond to his question, the toxicity of his mental state begins to assert itself and he repeats, "Or what?" with more
of an edge than last time.

"Do you really need me to explain?"

Money in a marriage plays the role of armaments in a war. Whoever is in possession of the better-stocked armory controls the
battlefield and usually wins the war. A sound marriage is a peacetime army, whose soldiers, lazy and oblivious, are smoking
pot and playing video games. But when the foundations of a marriage start to shake, the drums of war begin to sound and the
army veers from unconscious to Defcon 4 in a blink. Stacy is now on high alert.

"Because I will explain if you want me to," she says in a way intended to imply he should know better than to ask.

A person does not stay married to someone for ten years without some kind of strong feeling underpinning the edifice, especially
if there was no money evident when the vows were taken. However much Lloyd had not enjoyed being married to his wife recently,
they had a shared history, a child, and in theory a future, and although she had transmogrified into a plucked and polished
West Side, social-climbing gorgon, she was still the woman who had driven out to Coney Island to ride the Cyclone roiler coaster
with him, taking his penis in her mouth as they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. And why had she engaged in this kind of salacious
behavior? Because she believed in him. She knew his talent, his enthusiasm, his youthful slap and tickle, would lead somewhere
she wanted to follow. Lloyd understood this, could see it in her eyes, and loved her for it. But that was a long time ago.

Reining in the ire he feels at Stacy's invidious comparison of him to Phil Sheldon, he asks her, "Remember when we sat on
that beach in Jamaica, what, ten years ago?" Jamaica had been another point of contention. She had wanted to go to the Bahamas,
a place where the natives were not known to hack tourists to pieces on the golf course, something Stacy heard happened in
Jamaica with alarming regularity. In her mind Jamaica was terra incognita, two steps from Africa, and who went there? Lloyd
had persuaded her to visit the more flavorful reggaesoaked island by promising to book them into a high-rise hotel in Montego
Bay, a Miami Beach-style resort area. He had wanted to go to Negril, a tattered town of jerk-chicken shacks and funky beachfront
hotels, but that was the deal: Montego Bay or nothing. "And you asked me how I wanted my life to go and I said I wanted to
be taken seriously? Do you remember?"

"Sure, I remember. And now you're taken seriously."

"In a ridiculous business."

"Ridiculous to who?"

"To me! I want to write a book."

"So who's stopping you?"

"About Frank Bones."

"Why?"

"Because I know him and he's a great subject."

"He kills someone and all of a sudden he's a great subject?"

"First of all, you have no idea whether or not he's guilty. If he's not, maybe I can help him prove it."

"What are you, a detective? Lloyd, if you want to be taken seriously, this isn't the way to do it."

"I'm flying to Tulsa tomorrow."

"No, you're not. You're going back to the office and you're going to work on the show."

The ride home from dinner is very quiet.

Lloyd is in his office watching the eleven-o'clock news when Stacy bursts through the door, grabs the remote control off his
desk, and wordlessly clicks over to
E! Entertainment!
Lloyd is shocked to see a handheld video image of Frank and himself at Duke's Coffee Shop. Frank is saying, "Marriage itself
is a point of contention, babe," to which Lloyd responds, "I could live in a refrigerator carton, but my wife, she thinks
she's Charles Foster Kane." Lloyd can feel Stacy's eyes piercing his head like drill bits as he continues to watch himself
slowly die. "We're building Xanadu over on the West Side. I want to get a dog just so I can name him Rosebud. She's out of
control. Whenever I leave the house, I have to remember to ask for my balls back." Before the tape ends and the host returns
to the screen, Stacy leaves the office. Lloyd does not bother going after her but instead stays and watches footage of Frank
and himself firing pistols. Otto has wasted no time cashing in. As for Lloyd, he can't decide whether he's more disturbed
by having inadvertently aired his marital laundry on national television or by having looked so uncomfortable handling a gun.

That night they sleep in separate bedrooms. Rather, Stacy sleeps. Lloyd just stares at the celling. In the middle of the night,
he gets up to e-mail his agent, his manager, and his lawyer, informing them he will be leaving
Happy Endings.
Lloyd loves e-mail since it means you never have to talk to anyone. He knows they'll be phoning, aggrieved at their loss of
commissions, but his cell phone has caller ID and he doesn't have to return their calls.

Dustin is asleep when Lloyd goes into his room to kiss him good-bye. He stands over his son's bed, hesitating for a moment.
Lloyd was never around when he was working on
The Fleishman Show,
which is probably one of the reasons the boy is so much closer to Stacy, and he has been preoccupied during the past months
at Lynx. As he looks at Dustin's sleeping face, he thinks,
It's better to be going now. When I can stand to be in the same room with myself, that's when we should get to know each other.
I'll spend some time with him away from Stacy, and the two of us will be like a real father and son. I worry she may have
turned the boy against me.

"Daddy?" Groggily, the kid awake.

"Go back to sleep."

"Where's Mommy?"

"She's sleeping."

"Can I ask you a question?"

Now Lloyd is resigned to the conversation taking place and uses a quiet tone, hoping to ease his son back to sleep.

"Sure, Pal. What is it?"

"Have you ever done anything for Dream Works?"

"What?"
Where the hell did that come from?

"Have you ever done anything for Dream Works?"

"Do you even know what Dream Works is?"

"Sophia's father works there." Sophia was a schoolmate of Dustin's at Tiny Tuna. "He's a producer."

"No," Lloyd says, watching Dustin's view of him plummet. "I haven't done anything for them. Now go back to sleep."

Dustin closes his eyes and Lloyd kisses the boy's forehead, eliciting a sleepy "Don't kiss me." Lloyd quietly tiptoes out
of the room. Then he turns off the burglar alarm and leaves the house.

Chapter 15

At dawn Frank awakens in the Tulsa County Jail. He has had a bad night's sleep on the metal bunk. A young guard brings him
an individual box of generic cornflakes for breakfast and asks for an autograph before he leaves, a request Frank politely
obliges, asking the guard if he can bring him a cake with a file in it later. The guard looks at him, puzzled for a moment,
then laughs as he gets the old joke. Left alone, he eats one flake at a time to make them last, Frank no stranger to incarceration,
having been tossed in jail overnight for the gun incident. But he has never looked at serious time before, and right now what
he is faced with feels like eternity, only without the cottony clouds and the harps.

He stares around the tiny cinder-block cell. Otis has parlayed his client's status as a man who has been on national television
into a private cell, so he is being kept from the common criminals, who might amuse themselves at his expense, something for
which Frank is extremely thankful, because whatever his transgressions, however much of an outsider he perceives himself to
be, he was never one of those hipsters who identified with convicts. Prisoners to Frank are losers with primitive tattoos
and hairnets who smelled bad and buggered each other, end of story. The Alexandre Dumas-Jean Genet-Jack Henry Abbott literary
tradition leaves him cold. A mass of sociopaths divided into homicidal gangs of blacks, Latinos, and white supremacists eating
dreadful food in a confined space for years on end; Frank just can't see the appeal. A concert, perhaps. Get some more street
cred and maybe a CD out of it. But an extended holiday in the pen? That is not going to work.

How does anyone ever manage to break out of jail? he wonders. He's heard the stories of guys digging their way out with spoons.
How long would it take to go anywhere with a spoon? More time than Frank has. And those were rural prisons anyway, Frank likely
headed to some high-tech concrete nightmare that will require a Ph.D. in engineering just to open a door. The escapes he's
heard about that didn't involve flatware usually required teamwork. A bunch of cons would formulate a plan and act in concert.
The drawback here is it requires friends, and Frank does not anticipate making any once he's incarcerated, busy as he'll be
Sliding along with his back to the wall in the theory that it is harder to sodomize a moving target. Thus, in his brief consideration
of the matter, escape does not present itself as a realistic possibility, so he'll just rot and either die in prison or get
released at an age when he won't be able to remember why he was there in the first place.

These prison vignettes he is formulating are all predicated on a supposition so disturbing he couldn't consider it for the
moment, and that is this: his winding up serving a prison sentence and not getting the death penalty. He had joked about it
to Otis, but it hangs there in the air around him, grinning madly, like a skeleton's head singing,
So long, it's been good to know ya, so long . . .

They have taken away his belt and shoelaces and his wallet. He would have loved a magazine, a trade paper (it didn't matter
what trade,
Plumber's Monthly
would do), anything to distract himself, to keep him from focusing on where he is, on who he is.

As he lies on his back, staring at the celling, he enumerates the arguments the prosecution will lavish upon the court if
the case goes to trial. The Cleveland gun incident would combine with the Los Angeles high-speed chase to create a neat criminal
pattern that fit nicely with the profile of someone who would kill a club owner for money. The DA's office could send a rookie
in and get a conviction. Unless Otis has talent to match his bluster, Frank is looking at a long-term problem. He runs the
titles of all the prison movies he can remember through his head:
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Riot in Cell Block 11, Birdman of Alcatraz, Jailhouse Rock, Cool Hand Luke, Brubaker, The
Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Fortune and Men's Eyes, Chicago.
Then there are the movies that aren't prison movies but have memorable prison sequences:
Sullivan's Travels,
with its message that comedy is a worthwhile thing to devote one's life to,
Midnight Express,
with its message that Turkish prison guards should be avoided;
GoodFellas,
with its message that a quality marinara sauce is not beyond the reach of the connected guy behind bars. And those are just
the men's prison movies. He doesn't want to start thinking about all the grade-Z prison chick flicks he's seen on cable at
three A.M., with their nubile prisonerettes in clingy jumpsuits that appeared to be on loan from a Helmut Newton shoot, and
their cheap but effective lesbians-for-straight-guys eroticism, for fear it will lead him in a masturbatory direction, which
somehow doesn't feel appropriate right now.

Frank is fighting off a vision of a voluptuous inmate being approached in the prison showers by a lascivious, bikini-clad
warden when the guard reappears at his cell door holding a pair of handcuffs. "Sorry, Frank, I have to cuff you before we
leave."

"Babe, can I get my sunglasses back?"

He imagined a couple of local television crews might be there for his moment of glory, since it wasn't every day a celebrity
was accused of killing someone in Tulsa, but when Frank, dressed once again in street clothes, emerges from the police van
for the perp walk to the courthouse and squints into the sun (his request to have his shades returned had been denied), he
is surprised to see the crews from
Entertainment Tonight
and
E! Entertainment!
pointing their cameras at him. As a guard emerges from the van to lead Frank inside, a male reporter whose dyed-blond hair
tips mark him as having flown in from Los Angeles for the occasion yells, "Frank, did you shoot Tino Suarez?"

Frank, never at a loss when a camera is on, replies, "I'm a patsy! I wasn't even in Dallas on November twenty-second!" After
a slight delay, the crews laugh, which causes the cameras to jiggle slightly as Frank continues to be hustled away amid cries
of "Frank, Frank!" and "Over here!"

Another reporter, a local woman with hard-looking blond hair asks, "Who do you think shot Suarez?"

"Anti-Castro Cubans acting with the acquiescence of the CIA!"

Someone else shouts, "How are you going to plead?"

The last words the media hears Frank speak before his arraignment are "I'm calling Jim Garrison!" an obscure reference to
the Kennedy-assassination prosecutor that no one in the media horde gets.

Frank is seated in a penned-off area at the side of the courtroom waiting for his case to be called. Several other miscreants
are with him. As far as he can tell, they are mostly street criminals who were picked up the previous evening and, having
all slept badly in jail, are thankfully ignoring him. But every file clerk, lawyer, guard, secretary, computer technician,
and janitor who works in the building appears to be taking a simultaneous coffee break because the room is packed. It's clearly
not every day a man of Frank's magnitude is arraigned on their premises.

The opening act is a fraternity boy, an undergraduate at the University of Tulsa, charged with drunk driving. He stands before
Judge Marston, a large black woman glowering at him. When she inquires why he was driving after he had consumed two six-packs
of beer, he replies, " 'Cause I was too drunk to walk," eliciting titters from the packed gallery. Judge Marston sets bail
and waves him away as if he were a cloud of methane. When Frank looks at the crowd, he sees Mercy has taken a seat in the
back. She meets his glance and smiles. Frank shakes his head wearily and tries to look amused instead of doomed.

At the front of the room the judge consults her notes. "Frank Bones?"

"Yes" comes Frank's answer from the penalty box.

The bailiff says, "Step to the judge's bench, please." Frank moves from the wings to the stage with as much dignity as he
can muster and tries to ignore the eyes of the mob.

"Do you have a lawyer, Mr. Bones?" the judge asks.

Frank turns away from the judge, his eyes panning the room before turning back to her and saying, "I did."

"And where is your alleged lawyer?"

At this moment the double doors leading to the courtroom burst open and Otis Cain makes his entrance.

"Your Honor!" Otis says, hurrying to the front of the room.

From Judge Marston's expression you can see that she does not cut Otis Cain any slack simply because their mutual ancestors
came over here on slave ships. "Yes, Mr. Cain?" she says with infinite patience.

"If it pleases the court, I am this man's lawyer."

"May I have a word with my attorney?" Frank inquires.

"Quickly," Marston says, having a fat docket to get through.

Frank leans into Otis and hisses, "Where the hell were you?"

"Talking to a reporter."

"About what?"

"About you! We show you in a sympathetic light in the press and no jury's gonna convict."

"I don't want any more publicity. I'm sick of being famous."

Judge Marston has already had enough of these two and brings their kaffeeklatsch to a close, demanding, "Mr. Bones, how do
you plead?"

"Very not guilty," Frank says.

Judge Marston writes this down. "So noted. Bail will be set at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars." At these words Frank
feels the floor open and swallow him whole.

The next morning, after another sleepless jailhouse night, Frank sits with Otis in a bare room set aside for prisoner/attorney
encounters. With them is a tough-looking, fiftyish Latino whose paunch, visible under his unbuttoned brown sports coat, is
a palimpsest laid over the younger, rangier version of himself. This is Manny Escobar and he is a ball bondsman.

"How much money you got?" Manny asks Frank by way of introduction.

Frank, who has thought about this, says, "I can have my bank wire twenty-five K."

Manny nods, the amount being sufficient, and writes the information down on a legal pad, saying, "I'm only doing this because
my kid likes you. If you jump, there's a skip tracer on your ass in five seconds and he carries a very big gun. He brought
a guy back from Texas for me with so many shotgun pellets in his ass he nearly bled to death during the ride." Then he smiles
at the memory, as if it's funny.

"I'll be a good boy," Frank assures him.

Manny slides the legal pad toward Frank. "Can I have your autograph? It's for my kid."

Frank dutifully signs.

Otis makes a couple of calls to speed the process and an hour later he and Frank are back in front of Judge Marston. "Mr.
Escobar has agreed to post ball for my client," Otis tells her.

"The defendant is freed and ordered to reappear to stand trial on"— she checks the calendar—"December seventeenth. That's
five weeks. Mr. Bones, the court would appreciate it if you didn't leave town before then, all right?"

Frank nods in assent and is pronounced a free man.

Frank is walking Otis to his car in the empty parking lot of the courthouse. The media swarm have returned to their nests
and are filing their reports.

"What am I supposed to do for money?" Franks asks.

"You need ten bucks for dinner or something?"

"I don't have a cent, Otis. Manny cleaned me out."

"Tell some jokes."

"What?"

"You're a comedian, right? I'll call Mrs. Suarez for you."

"Tino's wife is going to let me play Club Louie?"

"Why not? It's business. I'll call and tell you what she says." Otis gets into his car, starts the engine. He waves distractedly
and drives off, leaving Frank to contemplate his advice.

"Frank?" Frank looks over and sees Mercy standing there. He smiles, pleased to see her.

"Need a lift?"

"I need a Thorazine IV. What are you doing here?"

"I called Otis. He said this is where I'd find you."

A few minutes later, Frank sits in the passenger seat of Mercy's beat-up Camaro as they drive out of the parking lot past
a gaggle of demonstrators holding placards that read JUSTICE FOR WAYMAN FRENCH. Turning to Mercy, Frank says, "This Wayman
French, the cops killed him?"

"That's the rumor," Mercy says, twiddling the knobs on the radio. In a moment, a woman's voice can be heard saying, "He didn't
do it. No way someone with those eyes killed anyone. They're not killer's eyes."

Then the voice of Wildman Simms, the shock jock: "First of all, he always wears sunglasses so you don't know what you're talking
about."

"I've seen pictures!" the woman says.

Wildman interrupts her, "Okay, we're running four to one not guilty."

"Do you mind if we turn this off?" Frank asks, turning it off.

"I don't think you killed anyone,'' Mercy says, not taking her gaze off the road. Frank doesn't respond. He's staring at the
pile of parking tickets stuffed between the passenger seat and the gearshift, held together with a rubber band. Frank picks
them up and takes a look. There are at least twenty.

"Unpaid?"

"I got a lot on my plate lately."

"You're more guilty than me."

She laughs and says, "Probably am."

Frank is getting out of the Camaro in the parking lot of the Trade Winds. Mercy watches him from the driver's seat. "You gonna
be all right?" she asks.

Frank leans on the car door, looking in. "Yeah, terrific. Think they have Court TV on cable here?"

"Want me to come up and watch with you?"

"I'm not into the groupie thing right now," Frank says, turning away from the car.

"Whoa, pardner!" Mercy throws open the car door, explodes out of her seat, and faces Frank over the roof, telling him, "I
am not a goddamn groupie, okay? I am not one of those short-skirted, leather-jacket-wearin', spike-heeled chicks who live
to sleep with stars. Is that registerin' on your radar, jokeboy?"

"Okay," Frank says, trying to keep from being sucked in by the backdraft. "I apologize."

"I don't even think you're so funny."