Beneath a Bloodshot Moon

by Sam Roskoe

I crept forward and into the light at the edge of the set.

  I couldn’t risk making a move yet. The old lush may have had a barrelful in him, but I wasn’t going to try and outrun his reflexes at this pace. It only took one squeeze of a trigger and one bullet to end a life.

  I wouldn’t have Charlie Jones’ death on my hands if I could help it.

  “Life is simple, Mr. Jones,” Tarquin went on as I crept up from the rear, “it is either a yes or a no. It is either day or night. Male or female. Simple choices, simple solutions. You find a killer, you kill the killer. No ifs ands or buts.”

  Charlie Jones tried to speak. His words were strained and rushed. The words didn’t mean much, everything he was trying to say was there in his wide and terrified eyes.

  He thought he was going to die.

  No, he was sure he was going to die. As sure as a man taking that final walk towards the electric chair.

  “No, no, no,” Tarquin said. “You had enough time to speak and enough time to get Daddy to help you out of this mess. But Daddy can’t hear you anymore. Nobody will hear you, except me. And I’m willing to listen, Mr. Jones. I’m willing to lend an ear as soft and welcoming as any Priest in the confessional box might give you.” Tarquin lowered the gun to his side as he stepped forward, his face as close as could be to Charlie Jones’. “Did you hear me? Would you like to confess to me what you did to that poor, poor girl? Don’t you want to go to your maker with your conscience clear?”

  Charlie Jones nodded quick enough to fling sweat off his forehead into the air.

  “Good boy” Tarquin said, patting Jones on the side of the cheek. “I won’t forgive you your sins, but who knows, God might be in the forgiving mood once you get to see him.”

  Tarquin pulled the rag from Jones’ mouth.

  I was twenty feet away now and looking for a way to tackle Tarquin without that gun of his going off and killing someone. The someone I was most afraid of it killing would be me, with everyone else in the world coming in a close second.

  It would have to be a perfectly timed move. I would have to put all my weight on to his right hand side, pin him to the floor and hope he didn’t have any of that drunk strength that lushes seemed to possess. You could put a lush into a ring and he’d last ten rounds with a heavyweight and still ask for a drink when it was over.

  “Talk now, because soon you won’t have any breath left,” Tarquin said. He took a step backwards. He lowered his head as if he were that Priest on the other side of a confessional.

  “I’ll talk, alright,” Charlie Jones said, his voice rising with anger.

  It was then that I saw the protection he’d talked about in that daily diary of his.

  It was a .22 Hipster, the kind that punks pulled on people in dark alleys.

  Charlie Jones had it pointed at Tarquin Meriwether

  Chapter 20

  I didn’t have time for any kind of perfect take down or to worry about the ungodly power of a lush who’d decided to fight back. I didn’t have much time to do anything but aim my .38 and give Charlie Jones the benefit of my doubt.

  “Hold it there, Jones!” I shouted as I rushed forward.

  Both men faced me. Only one kept his gun high enough to do any damage. Charlie Jones.

  “You? What are you doing here?” he said.

  I let him see the dangerous end of my .38.

  “I’m here to stop you kids from playing with guns. Don’t you know they’re bad for your health?”

  “Bad for that old bastard, maybe,” Charlie Jones said.

  Tarquin Meriwether raised his gun.

  “As old as I may be, I would never lay a hand upon a woman.”

  “You’re not playing with a full deck, old man,” Charlie Jones said.

  “And I’m seeing one too many guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.” I said. “Now how about we call a truce here and see if we can’t talk this thing through.”

  I doubted there would be much in the way of peace talks, not after what Charlie Jones had been through. Tarquin Meriwether had probably cold cocked the kid as he came onto Stage Six. Then again, the kid had to know there was some kind of danger lurking in the shadows to make sure he came prepared.

  Either which way, I didn’t think it would be a good idea to have any dead bodies ruining the party.

  “Truce? I would no more call a truce with this, this killer than I would have Hitler around for a late supper,” Tarquin said.

  “Crazy old bastard thinks I’m offed Marla.”

  I let out sly laugh.

  “Maybe he’s thinking along the right lines.”

  “What’s that? Are you serious?” Charlie Jones said, his eyes bugged with surprise and a little hurt. “What reason could I have for killing Marla?”

  “How about I let Tarquin there tell me why, and you can just take a seat over there while he does. How does that float your boat, Jones?”

  “It doesn’t. Maybe I’ll just plug this old maniac and have done with it? Maybe I’ll do that?”

  I took a few casual steps toward him, my gun trained on his chest.

  “Sure, you could try, but there are two guns on you, Jones. Two against one. That’s the kind of odds you never play when there are bullets involved. You want to spin the wheel, Jones, go ahead, and spin it. But I’m betting the house wins every God damn time.”

  He looked from me to Tarquin and back again, then he looked our guns over. My .38 and the .38 in Tarquin’s hands were more than enough to outweigh the little cap gun he had on him.

  “Fine,” he said, holding his gun hand in the air, “you just tell your fairy story old man. It don’t make a lick of difference. I didn’t kill nobody and come tomorrow I’ll be on a plane away from this town for good. Ain’t nothing going to stop that from happening.”

  I waved over to a set of fake stone steps on the set. I pushed him into a seated position and stood over him as Tarquin joined us.

  “Okay, talk,” I said to Tarquin, “first you can tell me why you took it on your heels away from the motel last night.”

  Tarquin dropped his gun into the pocket of his jacket. From the other he took out a quarter bottle of cheap Canadian rye.

  “A memory aid only,” he said, tipping the bottle at me for approval.

  “Go ahead,” I said, “but no more than a sip.”

  “Indeed.”

  He knocked back more than any sip I’d ever seen. It was a slug at best, but more of a gulp. The kind a man might take after emerging from the desert and finding an oasis.

  “You trust this old lush to tell you the truth? He’s one glass away from drowning,” Charlie Jones said.

  “Yeah, but of the two of you, he’s the one who hired me.” I let him see my big smile.

  He let me see his big frown.

  We were about even.

  “Well, Mr. Finch,” Tarquin Meriwether said, “it goes a little something like this. Fearing I would certainly be left to die of thirst out there in the parking lot, I vowed to remedy the situation at the nearest bar I could find. Your dog, of course, did not want to follow me. A more stubborn animal I have yet to come across in my life. So I toddled along without him, and found the nearest hole in the wall, which by happenstance, was one I used to frequent in the days, not so long ago, when I called this lot my home. A fine establishment by the name of the Pineapple Lounge. Have you heard of it?”

  Every other joint in Hollywood was named after a fruit or some exotic sounding far flung place. I hadn’t heard of this particular dive, but I could guess it would be as alike as all the other dives.

  “Never have, but please, do go on.”

  Charlie Jones didn’t want him to go on, not until he’d had his say.

  “It’s a dump where all those old war horses go to swap stories about how everything was better before now and how it should all go back to what it was like back then,” he said. “You can throw a rock in there and hit someone who used to know Faulkner, or Hemmingway or whoever has a book in the
best seller list this month. Just a lot of washed up old timers flapping their gums.”

  Tarquin glared at Charlie Jones for a long time before he continued.

  “In any case, Mr. Finch, whilst there, and after only one or two drinks, I began to feel a little misty about what I’d left behind, and what I might never see again. You spend so many years behind a typewriter pounding out dreams for other people to fashion into realities, you become quite accustomed to a particular way of life. After some deliberation I figured a jaunt to my old hunting grounds would not be amiss, and luckily the bar was quite empty of anybody who might have recognized this most-wanted face of mine. All it would have taken was one patrolman with a hankering for a beer to take off the edge and our story might have finished right there.”

  Charlie Jones tutted. “Sounds like one of this old bastard’s scripts. All buildup and no punch.”

  “I taught you everything you know, and I didn’t have to either, you ungrateful little bastard. I could have sent you for a loop, but I never did. I never, not once, let your relationship with your father get in the way of what you needed to know, and what only I could give you.”

  I held up a hand.

  “Okay, his father is Elsnick, right? I mean, as far as I can make out, Jones here has some pull on the lot and that pull is because of Elsnick.”

  “If you could call him a father,” Charlie Jones said.

  “And what would you call him?” I asked.

  “Invisible,” he said, his voice low and lost.

  “I’ve seen him twice in as many days, he doesn’t look so invisible to me, too big around the waist for one thing,” I said.

  Charlie Jones let out a big sigh. It was big enough to fill Stage Six and not leave much room for anything else.

  “If you want a sob story about how he left my mother to fend for herself, or how he tried to cover up that I was his own, even had someone try to destroy my birth records, then I got that tale for you. Want to know how it took me five years to get him to even acknowledge me, and even then how he’d only do it if I kept any ties I had with him secret? Want to know the battle I had to get even on the lowest rung at this dream factory? I’ve got plenty of tales about the old man and I’ll tell him if I get half the chance.”

  “But you won’t, right? Because he’s sending you off to some New York hideaway, and my guess is that it’s the kind of place where a young man like yourself wouldn’t want to tell any nasty stories in case he lost it all.”

  “It’s plush alright,” Charlie Jones said, “but that don’t mean nothing to me.”

  “Of course it does,” Tarquin Meriwether said, “you’re like all these young Turks trying to climb the ladder. You don’t care about story or the craft. You only care about a place up in the Hills or a private yacht out in the harbor with starlets to match.”

  “You keep telling yourself that, you old lush. Last time you put a piece of clean bond into a typewriter was back when you had your own teeth.”

  Tarquin’s cheeks flushed with anger.

  “I’ll have you know I still have all but four of my teeth in this old head of mine. And you’re wrong on the script front as well, but you wouldn’t know that, would you?”

  “Sure, you put your name on all the scripts. You may as well be a soap powder. Tarquin Meriwether gets your whites whiter than white. Guaranteed to add box office receipts to you picture. Or your money back!” Charlie Jones wrote the advert in the cold air-conditioned air of Stage Six with his gesticulating hands.

  I was beginning to feel like a referee at a high-school wrestling meet.

  “Okay, okay, the both of you, I don’t want to hear about whose better than who and who did what when, unless either of you know about the script for a picture named ‘Beneath a Bloodshot Moon’, then we’ll just stop on this track and go…”

  They were both looking at me like they’d seen a ghost.

  “What did you just say?” Tarquin said.

  “Beneath a Bloodshot Moon, the script for it. Do you know anything about it? Do either of you know anything about that script?”

  “You have the script?” Charlie Jones said.

  “No.”

  “Then why mention it?” Tarquin said.

  “Okay, hold up the both of you. When I mentioned that name you both looked like you’d been slapped in the face. What gives?”

  “Voodoo, Mr. Finch, just some old Hollywood voodoo,” Tarquin said.

  “Hardly,” Charlie Jones said.

  Tarquin gave Charlie Jones a long, hard stare.

  “You were probably in diapers the first time that script made the rounds, how would you know anything about it?”

  “It’s an old wives’ tale, nothing more. The script doesn’t exist, and it never did exist. Everything else about it is real enough though.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but should I go out and come in again so you can start at the beginning? Neither of you are making sense.”

  “It’s like this,” Tarquin said, “years ago, when the talkies first came into being there was a script, one that no writer claimed to own. The title of that script was ‘Beneath a Bloodshot Moon’. Not much of a story to it, so the legend goes, just a three-act mystery with the usual suspects gathered in a drawing room at the end for the investigator to uncover the killer. Six directors tried to tackle the project in the space of a single year and all six died, along with their leading ladies. Each met a brutal and violent end by murder or suicide or what have you. And so—“

  Charlie Jones butted in.

  “So from then on, whenever anyone had film they wanted to put the kybosh on, a project they considered stillborn, they’d rename it ‘Beneath a Bloodshot Moon’ so that nobody would dare take on the project later on down the line. It became a code word for a project that was about to hit the skids, or any troubled production on the lot.”

  I pointed to the interior of Stage Six.

  “Wasn’t all this supposed to be based on “Beneath a Bloodshot Moon”? Didn’t they change the name?”

  “Sure,” Charlie Jones said, “once Marla died they did.”

  “Her dying changed their minds?”

  “If it bleeds, it leads, Mr. Finch,” Tarquin said. “If there is one thing Hollywood loves more than scandal, it is a murderous scandal. It plays well at the box office.”

  “And the script? The original ‘Beneath a Bloodshot Moon’?” I said.

  “As grand as the legend may have become, the script is even more steeped in mystery, Mr. Finch.”

  “How so?” I said.

  “It has never been seen, not by anybody living at least. Those who claimed to have a copy would die not long afterwards before they could verify its existence. There are those who claim it has powers beyond the brining of bad luck. Those who claim—“

  “They think the script has a positive as well as a negative effect,” Charlie Jones said.

  I tipped my hat far back enough to for it to fall off in a light breeze, or if I heard another little bit of fancy whoosh by me.

  “Okay, this is all sounding a lot like hooey to me. Are you both telling me this script is somehow magical?”

  “Yes,” Tarquin Meriwether said.

  “No, of course not,” Charlie Jones said. “Don’t listen to this old lush. The script doesn’t exist, it never did exist, and any power anybody claims for it is nothing but hogwash.”

  “Someone want to tell me what power, other than killing people, this thing is supposed to have?”

  “It brings good luck,” Tarquin said. “To those who possess the script but who do not make the fact public, they are granted an almost infallible and uncannily good fortune. A business deal, a trading stock, the right horse at the Kentucky Derby, all of these things are guaranteed if you own the script, but do not make a public acknowledgement of such.”

  “It’s hoeey, popeycock, but all these old geezers carry on as if it were the Gospel,” Charlie Jones said.

  “You wouldn’t know if it were hoo
ey, you can barely write your name in the snow.”

  “And if you ever got out from under that barstool you’ve been hiding under, you might be able to see the snow once in a blue moon.”

  I looked up to the blood moon that looked down on all of us.

  “Okay, okay. Enough,” I said. “I want to hear why you think Charlie here killed the girl. We can talk about magical scripts later. Go on.”

  “I never killed her,” Charlie Jones said. “I couldn’t kill her. I was in love with her.”

  Both I and Tarquin said “What?” at the same time.

  I thought I could see some tears in Charlie Jones’ eyes, or maybe it was the reflection off the big lights above us on Stage Six.

  “We were supposed to elope. Just get away from all this mess after they tagged the production as another ‘Bloodshot Moon’. We had it all planned out. We’d buy a house in the Florida Keys, somewhere quiet and away from everything. We’d start a new life and then…”

  “Then you murdered her,” Tarquin said, stepping forward. He had the gun out again and pointed at Charlie Jones’ head.

  “Now why would I do that? Why would I kill the woman I loved?”

  “Because you’re a liar. A born liar, just like your father. Because I remember what happened at the party and what happened just after. You were there. You were the one with the knife in your hand, cutting the cake. The one who led her away from this place that night and to her doom. Don’t try to deny it.”

  Charlie Jones found enough courage to stand up to the gun pointed at his face.

  “I do deny it, you old lush. Pull the trigger if you’re going to pull the trigger, but don’t tell me that what I felt for Marla wasn’t true. Don’t you dare tell me that what I felt for Marla wasn’t something real. Don’t you dare.”

  “You may have convinced yourself, Charlie, but not me. No sir. Because I can see clearly now, as clear as the day before I took my first sip of liquor. You were there, and so was that agent of hers, and so was your father.”

  I jumped between the two of them.

  “And do you remember what else you told me? Who else you said was there?” I said to Tarquin.