by JL Bryan
She looked at the floor around the nightstand, checking to see whether it had fallen. Her wheezing intensified. A thick gurgling rose from her chest.
Then she reached toward where her cane had been and found that it, too, was missing. It was heartbreaking watching the horror and pain on her face.
Finally spotting her cane on the closet door across the room, she pushed herself to her feet and walked, badly stooped, gasping for air, her face darkening in the black and white movie world like she was running out of air.
She collapsed halfway to the closet, then used the last of her strength to crawl on hands and knees. She reached out, her fingertips barely brushing the cane’s surface. Then she collapsed completely.
She shuddered on the floor, too weak even to gasp, too little air left to cough and wheeze.
“Then I made my move,” Preston’s voice said inside my head, while I watched him tiptoe into the room, puffing merrily on his cigar, and gently lift a pillow from the bed. “The final crush to put her out of her misery.”
Ruby looked up from the floor and saw her son-in-law standing over her with the pillow in his hands, preparing to finish her off. I would have looked away if I could, but I was caught inside this illusion, a captive audience to the narrative Preston seemed eager to present.
Terror flashed in Ruby’s eyes as she understood he was going to kill her.
Then her eyes shifted, staring blankly, and all tension left her body.
“In the end, her sickness offed her,” Preston narrated. “Luck was on my side that day. I told myself it was probably an act of mercy, anyway, ending her suffering. Now I just had to cover up the deed. Thinking like Chance kept me cool-headed like that. She was already going stiff when I picked her up.”
He returned the woman’s body to her bed, tossing the blanket over her but not bothering to close her empty, staring eyes. He replaced the nebulizer and cane where he’d originally found them, then left the bedroom and closed the door behind him.
Then, Preston-as-Chadwick looked directly at me, like a character breaking out of the story to address the audience, and grinned around his cigar.
“When my wife found her dead ma, she howled like a wolf caught in a bear trap,” he told me.
A scream sounded from inside the bedroom.
The door opened, and young Nancy Jackson Williams emerged sobbing and threw her arms around Preston, who remained in cool, collected Chadwick mode.
“She’s gone!” Nancy sobbed into her husband’s shoulder. “She’s really gone!”
He embraced her and murmured words of comfort… but he also looked over her shoulder and shot me a big, triumphant smile. Happy, jazzy, big-band music rose all around us.
Suddenly, I was at the drive-in’s grand opening, which I recognized from the big newspaper spread, and it was packed. There was a festival atmosphere, with a band playing live music in front of the screen while the crowd waited for the sunset.
Stanley Preston walked among the crowd, shaking hands, smiling, posing for photographs, and generally soaking up the attention from the mobs of people who’d come out to his theater. He was in his real form, feeling no need to pretend to be a Chance Chadwick character that day.
I didn’t see his wife Nancy with him. Maybe she was inside the concession stand, feverishly serving the throngs of people who streamed out holding hamburgers, fried chicken, cotton candy and ice cream cones.
“Life was fine as frog’s hair after that,” Preston narrated. “The drive-in was the way of the future; I was sure of that. Business boomed, crowds packed the place every night, and it looked like I was turning into a real big wheel in the movie biz, after all. Never mind the directors who wouldn’t put me onstage. Here, I ran the whole show. And I guess that made me the real star.
“Then, in ’59, the news hit me like a sucker punch to the heart.”
On the screen tower, a jittery newsreel reported the murder of Adaire Fontaine, including footage of the same mansion I’d seen on the Super 8 stalker reel, and clips of her most famous movies, Legend of the South and A Soldier’s Dame.
“I could say she was the love of my life, but that’s not enough,” Preston narrated, while I watched his 1959 self stare in horror at the news. “She was a goddess, cut from finer cloth than most everyone, so fine I was lucky to touch it at all, before she went on to glory and forever out of my reach.
“Who had destroyed that? Who had murdered that? Who had taken the light from my sky and snuffed her out? Who had dared? I knew I would never be the same. My soul went dark that day.”
Personally, I figured his soul had gone dark sometime before he’d started plotting his mother-in-law’s murder, but I found I couldn’t speak. This wasn’t an audience-participation performance, it seemed.
“I obsessed over her murder. People said it was the director, Mazzanti, but he never went to prison. Typical. Some Hollywood bigshot gets away with murder, and there’s no justice for the victim. Years went by, and nothing happened. Like nobody even cared anymore. She was just some wild girl from Tifton who ran away to California and got herself offed. People forgot about her. But I cared, and I didn’t forget.
“So, I kept thinking, what would Ramblin’ Jim Scarsdale do? What would Chance Chadwick do? I cooked up a new plan. It wasn’t easy, but it was nothing Chance Chadwick couldn’t handle.”
I found myself in a crowded cafe, and judging by the clothing and hair, we were definitely in the late 60s or early 70s, and a long way from the rural South.
Stanley Preston sat at a table by a window, out of place in his white seersucker suit. He’d grown out a goatee and really had some Colonel Sanders energy going.
Across from him was the voluptuous Portia Reynolds, dressed in orange bell bottoms and a flowery blouse, a slender pink silk scarf around her neck, her dark brown hair long and freshly ironed. She hung on Preston’s every word as he spoke, beaming and fluttering her eyelashes at him.
“I picked her because she’d starred in a Mazzanti picture a few years earlier, just like Adaire was doing when he killed her. That tied her to Mazzanti, you see. I found Portia Reynolds in the phone book. A two-bit actress with a failing career can’t afford to be too hard to find.
“I told her I was a playwright from the Deep South, and I’d just signed a three-picture deal with Warners. Before I knew it, I had her eating out of my hand.”
Soon I was following them, in a long Scorsese-esque tracking shot, up through the dim stairwell of an apartment building—which, unfortunately, I also recognized from the stalker video—through her apartment door as she unlocked it and led him inside.
She poured him a drink and put on a record. “Mississippi Queen” by Mountain filled the air, perhaps her subtle tribute to his alleged reputation as a great Southern playwright.
Portia danced, and Preston filmed her with his Super 8, and I tried to scream at her to get out of there.
Instead, she was flirtatious, willing to put on a big performance for the chance at a role in a Warner picture. She drew him through a beaded curtain into her bedroom.
She lay back, and he straddled her, still filming her. She pointed at the camera and laughed, shaking her head; she didn’t want him filming what came next.
But she was wrong about what came next, because Preston grabbed her silk scarf and pulled, strangling her with it, filming her death throes.
“Things were going real smooth, smooth as silk,” Preston said in my head. “Until a new wrinkle walked in. Portia’s roommate, another nobody actress named Grace LeRoux.”
The willowy blonde actress giggled at first, thinking she’d walked in on an intimate moment, then screamed as she realized Portia wasn’t moving.
“Well, that was one heck of a cock-up, but I put it to rights,” Preston’s voice told me as he chased Grace LeRoux, catching her before she could flee the apartment. He tied her to her own bed with a couple of Portia’s scarves, then tied another one around her neck.
He stopped to change his came
ra to a fresh reel, then filmed her murder, too.
“Once that was all squared away, I was glad the other girl showed up,” Preston told me. “Two murders was a much bigger story than one. I added an occult angle, something that could point to Antonio Mazzanti, since his films were known for that.” He painted blood-red pentagrams on the wall, and inverted crosses, and the words Satana sarà vittorioso. “That means Satan will be victorious. I translated it from Italian using a dictionary at the library. Again, Mazzanti.”
Preston quickly tossed the apartment, stealing anything of value—jewelry, cash, even their bank books with their checks—and made his exit. “I went straight to the airport. Before anybody found their bodies, I was across the continent, back home like nothing ever happened. That was the nice thing about my secret ability to become Chance Chadwick. He was the original smooth operator, always able to bluff his way out of a jam, always a step ahead of the other guy, with an ace hidden in his pocket, a scam, an exit strategy. The real Chance was dead, had been dead for years, but that just made it easier for me to become him. Because nobody else was filling his spot in the world, you see?”
Sounded crazy to me, but he still wasn’t letting me speak, even when seeming to ask me a question. What a narcissist.
“Now, don’t think I wasn’t sweating bullets for weeks after that.” The view changed to show him back home, sitting at the kitchen table, reading a newspaper article headlined ‘Silk Strangler’ Murders Continue to Baffle LAPD. Preston looked like his normal self again, a little slouchier and grayer than I’d seen him before, his goatee trimmed back to a mustache again.
The kids had grown up and gone, the kitchen was looking a bit rundown, and Nancy did dishes in the background. She was talking, but Preston paid her so little attention that none of her words made it into his memory that I was watching.
“I kept expecting them to come for me,” Preston said, while his past self jerked and looked up at a sudden loud knock on the door. But it was only the mailman. “Funny thing is, nobody ever did. People suspected Mazzanti, considering his history with Adaire Fontaine and Portia Reynolds. But they didn’t arrest him. That was all right, though. Chance and I had a plan for that, too.”
I stood in a dim, smoky biker bar that seemed weirdly familiar, until I realized I’d seen a picture of it in the Los Angeles Free Press interview, where the now-defunct underground newspaper had caught up with the once-celebrated director near the end of his life, drinking himself to death at his favorite watering hole.
Preston, looking more Chance Chadwick than ever despite the fact that fedoras and Chance Chadwick mustaches were both long out of fashion by 1970, approached the balding, unhealthy-looking director where he sat alone in the back of the bar, eyes hidden behind round black sunglasses.
Mazzanti frowned as he approached, but Preston took out a twenty and placed it on the table.
“I told him I was a big fan,” Preston’s narration continued. “The biggest. I showed up in my best suit and insisted on buying him a drink, anything he wanted. He ordered a tall glass of whiskey. I’d read up on him and knew he was hard up for cash, and a dope fiend besides, so I hoped he’d look at me as a mark to milk. And he went for it. We had a drink, he said he liked my Chance Chadwick look, he laughed when I did my Chadwick impression, he said it was spot on, the greatest he’d ever seen. ‘You should have been in pictures,’ he said. The great director, he actually told me that. I could have done anything Chance Chadwick did, if I hadn’t gotten such a raw deal in life.
“Keeping to my plan, I drop a few hints that maybe I’m a junkie, too, and next thing you know we’re in the hotel where he’s living, and I’m forking over hundreds of dollars, buying all the heroin his dealer could bring.”
The scene cut to a dreary, rundown hotel room full of dirty clothes, scattered trash, and more than one ashtray overflowing onto the carpet.
I have to say this was turning into one of the bleakest movies I’d ever seen, because I then had to watch Mazzanti shoot himself up with heroin.
“I watched the process slowly, the spoon, the lighter, all of it,” Preston narrated, while the 1970 version of him sat in the hotel room chair and stared. “When he was good and high, I started talking about her. About Adaire. I just wanted to hear him admit it. And he did. He admitted to killing her.
“When it was my turn, I cooked up a big needleful of that junk myself, doing just what he’d done, and I jammed it in his arm and shot him up again. And I kept doing it until none was left. I wanted him blacked out, unconscious. If he died, that was fine, I could live with that.
“Then I planted the evidence.”
Preston unloaded, from the pockets of his jacket, the jewelry and bank checks he’d taken from Portia Reynolds and Grace LeRoux after murdering them, dumping them into the top drawer of the hotel room dresser, among Mazzanti’s socks and underwear.
Then he took one of Mazzanti’s cigarettes and lit it. After a couple of puffs, he positioned it carefully under a floor-length window curtain.
“I’d timed it back home, and I had about four or five minutes before the cigarette burned down to where it would light up the drapes. Chance Chadwick used the same kind of trick in The Nightingale Job, only the cigarette lit a dynamite fuse instead of a window curtain.” Preston headed out the hotel room door, leaving it cracked behind him. “I beat feet to put that place in the rearview—the rearview of a cabbie zipping me to the airport so I could fly the coop before the law dogs came sniffing.”
Preston’s narration fell silent. I thought the movie might end there, but a little more followed.
I found myself in Preston and Nancy’s bedroom, watching them sleep by the full moon. That was awkward, though fortunately they were fully dressed in flannel nightclothes.
“And that was that,” Preston said. “Mazzanti was found dead, but the evidence was there, and everybody knew he was a murderer for sure. I finally got justice for Adaire. But I had problems back home.”
I hoped this wasn’t going to delve too deeply into any kind of marital issues with his wife, and fortunately it didn’t.
“The people I killed, I kept having dreams about them,” Preston said. “And then something else made it worse.”
A thump, thump, thump echoed through the house.
Preston’s eyes opened. Nancy remained asleep, utterly at peace.
It came again—thump, thump, thump.
He sat up and got out of bed.
“Somebody was in the house,” he told me. “Only problem was, nobody but us lived there anymore. And I knew that sound… but it couldn’t be. She’d been dead fifteen years. But that was how she summoned us, with that awful banging cane, whenever she wanted anything. Made me happy as a pig in slop to deprive her of that at the end of her life.”
Preston drew a shotgun from under the bed and tiptoed down the hall, looking terrified.
Thump, thump, thump.
With the muzzle of the shotgun, he nudged open the door to the back bedroom, Ruby’s room, still furnished with her belongings.
The old woman sat on the edge of her bed, as she so often had in life, banging her cane to summon assistance from a family member. The moonlight fell across her body, and her cane, but left her face in shadow. She wore a double strand of pearls and a peach dress.
She rapped the cane again, in full sight of Preston. Thump, thump, thump.
“You’re dead,” Preston said.
“We’re all dead,” she replied, her voice brittle.
She banged the cane again—thump, thump, thump. Then again, louder, faster, more violently, the end of it pounding dents into the hardwood floor. Thump thump thump THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP—
Preston turned on the lamp, and he got his first good look at her.
She was dead, rotten, horrible, just as she’d been when she approached me in the parking lot. Only now she seemed to be grinning ear to ear, too many of her teeth visible through her rotten cheeks.
THUMP THUMP
THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP—
Preston fired the shotgun. The window by the bed exploded.
Nancy screamed and ran into the room.
Ruby was gone; Preston stared at the bed where she’d been.
“Ruby bothered me all the time after that,” Preston narrated. “Her cane would knock all night. Or I’d be in a room alone, and look up and see her staring at me, like she’d been there a long time before I’d noticed. She never bothered Nancy, though. Nancy never heard or saw a thing.
“That’s why I moved out to the tower.”
I saw him sitting in the second-floor room that was now Callie and Benny’s bedroom. It was unadorned; he hadn’t even hung his beloved movie posters up here. Just a bed and a chair, where he smoked a cigar and looked out the window at the highway, winding away toward Pembroke and the inland world in one direction, toward Savannah and the ocean in the other.
“Ruby’s ghost left me alone out there. Nancy wouldn’t join me, and I couldn’t blame her. She’d lived her whole life in that farmhouse, since the day she was born. I guess we lived apart, we grew apart. That’s how it goes sometimes.
“I dreamed all the time of Portia Reynolds and Grace LeRoux, Antonio Mazzanti, and most of all my beloved Adaire Fontaine, for whom I’d done it all.
“Once, I tried to explain it all to Nancy. In some crazy way, I thought it would patch things up between us. I was wrong.”
I saw the two of them sitting in a Buick convertible, both gray-haired now, Stanley in the driver seat and Nancy beside him. The top was down, and they were watching a movie.
It wasn’t on the big screen, though. It was on his smaller, portable screen, set up along with an eight-millimeter projector, right in front of their car. A miniature drive-in, for one car only.
Nancy watched in horror as her husband strangled Portia Reynolds to death on the small screen.
“Before I could even load the second reel of the murder double feature, Nancy was hysterical, refusing to listen,” Preston narrated inside my head.
Nancy was, in fact, pushing her way out of the car, then running across the parking lot as fast as her feet could carry her… unfortunately, she was frail and collapsed.
