by Ed Kurtz
“Yeah?”
“This Charley? Charley McCormick?”
It was that detective from Midtown South. Walker.
“Yeah, it’s me, Walker.”
“Just checking the number you gave out. And making sure you made it home all right.”
“How chivalrous of you.”
“Yeah, well that’s the kind of guy I am. Keep in touch, kid.”
“I don’t think anything’s going to come up, but if it does…”
“Make sure I know about it.”
“Yeah, sure. Look, there’s a Joan Blondell movie on television and I don’t want to miss it.”
“Keep in touch,” the detective repeated.
Walker rang off and Charley made a face at the phone. Kid. That stuff really got to him.
He returned to his warm little spot on the sofa to resume the film. Franz took a noisy gulp from his beer and cleared his throat.
“Why’d you say that?”
“Why’d I say what?”
“That you were watching a Joan Blondell movie.”
“Because I am. What about it?”
“It’s just that most anybody woulda said ‘I’m watching a Cagney picture,’ on account of Jim fucking Cagney’s in it. Everybody knows Cagney. Who the fuck ever talks about Joan Blondell?”
“All right,” Charley said. “Jesus Christ, okay. So I’m a Joan Blondell fan. Don’t make a goddamned federal case out of it.”
Franz grunted, clearly dissatisfied with the way the discussion had ended, and they both returned their respective attentions to the glowing television screen in silence. Guy Kibbee was getting needled by some cop, but it was all a set-up designed by Cagney. Man, that little Irishman could smirk. Charley thought about Walker and getting needled by him. But that was no set-up; those cops had every reason to be there and twice as much to put the needles on Charley. He’d just had a date at the movies with a dead chick. Bleeding out, all over the floor of the Harris balcony. And he’d thought she was just frightened by the picture, the idiot. He shivered.
After a while, he fell asleep sitting up at the end of the sofa. He never even got to finish the Blondell picture.
He didn’t tell Franz about the murdered girl, either.
Chapter 3
Charley woke up around ten in the morning, a lot earlier than he would have liked to. If he’d had his way he would have kept on sleeping until the following morning or the morning after that. But there was just too much to do before he had to show up for work. He had to drop off his rent at the super’s office. He’d promised Franz he would pick up some crullers at that joint out on Eighty-Sixth Street he liked so much. And, of course, he had to be on Andy’s set out on Staten Island by noon.
If anyone ever asked Charley how exactly he had gotten involved in one of Andy Donovan’s infamous little film shoots he probably wouldn’t have had an answer ready. Andy was a sandstorm, a whirlwind that just sucked people up into it. One minute you were just minding your business and going about your ordinary, mundane existence, and then before you knew it you had a boom mike taped to a broom handle in your hand, hovering over a couple of Andy’s naked friends rolling around on the floor while Andy got every second of it on sixteen millimeter film. That was pretty much the long and short of it for Charley; he dutifully showed up whenever Andy told him to, but he never really understood why he did it. Nonetheless, Andy said to be there at noon, and Charley wasn’t about to let the great director down.
While he shaved and combed pomade into his shiny black hair and got dressed for the day, the girl at the Harris never strayed too far from his mind. He did a pretty good job at keeping her from the very forefront of his thoughts, but there was nothing he could do to forget about it altogether. The main thing was the nagging question that seemed to have come to him while he slept: was there anything he could have done?
Probably not.
After all, who even considers that a thing like that is possible? Naturally, anything could happen on the Deuce and much of it usually did, but he would never have dreamed in a million years that a girl was going to get a knife in the back right beside him in the middle of a horror movie. Still, the simple fact that he was there, and that she was killed, and perhaps worst of all that he was wondering about the possibility of getting her bellbottoms off before the night was done…
He shook it off and slipped his feet into his Staceys, ready to face the impossibly long day ahead of him. There was still time for a cup of coffee and maybe some corned beef hash at some Union square lunch counter before he boarded the R Line to the bus for Staten Island. He caught the subway at the First Street station and took it up to Union Square where he bought the morning edition of the Post and parked himself on a stool at a little short-order diner. He sipped at the bitter coffee and waited on his hash while he unfolded the paper.
And there she was.
The girl from the Harris.
She made the sidebar on the front page, just to the side of a malicious headline that questioned the meaning of the mayor’s bachelorhood. There was a little black and white photo on top, sort of grainy but recognizable, in which she was smiling with her head crooked back. She looked a bit like one of the models in the Macy’s catalogues who were meant to look like wearing those particular jeans was the most fun a girl could ever hope for. In smallish black print just beneath the photo was her name.
Charley squeezed his eyes shut. He was not sure he really wanted to know this.
Not that. Not her name.
He was close enough as it was, too close without making it personal. Once she had a name then she became more fully human, a girl with a family that gave her that name and begged her not to go off to the big, bad city and who might not yet know that she was dead.
Something thumped on the counter in front of Charley and the guy in the paper hat said, “Hey. Your hash, pal.”
Charley opened his eyes, and wet, white spots rippled out like water does when you toss a stone in it. He said, “Thanks.”
But he’d lost his appetite. The hash looked good enough—it smelled great—but he knew he couldn’t expect to keep anything down now that he’d read the name.
Elizabeth Anne Hewlett.
Charley whispered, “Damn it.”
Tottenville sat on the southernmost tip of Staten Island, and it felt to Charley like the edge of the world. It was the most provincial spot one could find within the city proper and it always had been. If there were anything like rednecks to be found inside the five boroughs, this was where they would be found. That in and of itself was enough to make Charley dread his frequent visits to the city’s nether regions, despite the old world quaintness the locals seemed so proud of. They had long resisted change and development, and even when they changed their tune to support the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge back in the Sixties, nothing much changed. It was still the same old Staten Island and the same old Tottenville, only easier to get to now.
Charley preferred the Ferry to bussing it all the way down—hard to beat that luxury cruise at a penny per mile—but he was no tourist. He was working, sort of. Otherwise he would take the Staten Island Ferry and just like most everybody else on the craft he’d ride it straight back to Manhattan without ever getting off. It was the ride everybody liked. Nobody actually wanted to see its destination.
The narrow, rambling Arthur Kill channel bordered Tottenville to the west with Jersey’s gloomy oil refineries looming on the other side. There were marshlands all around overrun by cattails and tall cord grass that hid burned out cars concealing who knew what horrible mysteries. It smelled stale and rotten out there in the marshes, and Charley had no plans to investigate.
Andy’s new digs were situated at the very end of Main Street where it almost met the Arthur Kill, a crumbling Colonial that used to be a hotel before it sat abandoned and derelict for the better part of a decade. Like the cars in the marshes, it was well hidden behind the overgrown poplars that lined both sides of the street,
which suited Andy just fine—that way he could expect fewer complaints about all the ne’er-do-wells and addicts and alcoholic hoboes he had staying in the place. Charley guessed he charged a fair price for the rooms, cheap enough for the sort of down-on-their-luck trash that filled up the joint, but Andy never seemed all that much better off for the endeavor. He was still too broke to pay any of the crew or amateur actors he’d conned into working on his latest opus.
He called it Bloody Birthright, although he teetered on how thrilled he was about that title. The whole thing was to be filmed inside the Tottenville Colonial, so Andy saw to it that every degenerate who rented rooms from him were on their way before the start of principal photography, which was the middle of last week. Now the place was largely empty, occupied only by Andy and his motley troupe of inept performers. Naturally Charley was offered a room as well, but he politely declined. He didn’t mind the biweekly jaunts out here to help Andy see his vision to fruition, but he would be damned before he moved clear out to the ass-end of Staten Island, even if it was only temporary.
He waltzed right into the place without knocking, as Andy insisted. Inside, two of the actors lounged on the couch, each of them decked out in period costumes of Andy’s own design. No one really thought very much of Andy’s knack for making movies, but he was clearly pretty good at making clothes. The actress, Carla, gave Charley a nod of acknowledgement. The actor, Jim, ignored him entirely. As Charley strode into the main room, Andy swept in from the kitchen and made an exaggerated face.
“Charley dear!”
Andy floated vividly over the floor and pulled Charley into a tight embrace, his bushy moustache tickling at Charley’s neck. He was an effeminate guy, Andy, but he didn’t look the part—instead he was all macho man with his poof of curly brown hair and the frontiersman moustache and the plaid wool shirts he usually wore. Lumberjack chic.
“Why, Charley, you look positively ashen! What’s the matter?”
Charley yanked himself free from Andy’s domineering grasp and forced a smile.
“Had a rough night.”
“Poor honey!” Andy crowed. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Good! There’s no time for that shit, anyway. I’ve got to shoot this goddamned pitchfork scene today, and if I don’t I’m going to murder somebody.”
Charley’s hash flipped in his stomach and he wobbled from side to side. Of all the damned things for Andy to say right now. Andy made a concerned face and patted Charley’s cheek with his hand.
“Oh, not you, Charley. You’re too pretty to kill. I’ll just slaughter all the ugly ones.”
On that note, Andy flitted off to his actors and clapped his hands together in a quick succession of loud reports.
“We’re losing time, people! Let’s get our shit together!”
Carla rolled her eyes at Charley, and he flashed a slight smile her way. She was a terrible actress but a very pretty girl. More than once since he’d met her Charley had considered the possibility of asking her out, but he always quickly dismissed the notion. It wasn’t that he was afraid of rejection, he just didn’t think he could stand all that new age nonsense she was always spouting, not to mention her strong impression that someday she was going to be a famous film actress. Charley was a bad liar, but he could never tell her how hopeless she was to her face.
“Carla on the divan! Jim, stand behind her!”
It wasn’t a divan. It was just an old couch. But there was no telling Andy that; one was liable to lose blood arguing with him.
The principals took their positions, and Andy took his trusty old Auricon 16mm camera out of the black case on the floor. Charley hurried over beside him and took hold of the makeshift boom mike. There was no one to run sound because the mike ran directly into Andy’s Auricon. It was an ancient newsreel camera, entirely unsuited to narrative feature filmmaking, and the sound was recorded directly to the optical track on the film itself. The trouble with this process was that the sound invariably ended up running a full second ahead of the picture, and Andy had no means to fix it in post. Instead, he tapped into his previous life as a theater director and devised mind-bogglingly complicated blocking for each scene to compensate for the delay in sound, creating unnatural pauses and a peculiar sense of en grande tenue throughout the picture.
Charley climbed up on top of the stepladder behind Andy and hoisted the broom handle boom up behind his shoulders. Now that all three of Andy’s illustrious cast and crew were in position, he roared “Scene!” and the magazine came alive, flicking rapidly as the filmstock sped through the gate.
The scene played horribly. Carla spewed each of her lines like the worst Vivien Leigh impression ever attempted, and Jim just sulked and stamped around the set with all the enthusiasm of a sleepy drunk. Her histrionics conveyed her character’s insistence that her brother, Jim’s character, would never see a dime of their father’s inheritance; he mumbled that he would, even if she had to die to protect his piece of the pie. Charley focused solely on holding the mike steady, although he dipped it from time to time when Jim’s voice oozed out of his lips like lazy billows of smoke.
There was no doubt about it; Bloody Birthright was going to be another Andy Donovan classic.
Finally, Jim stalked out of the scene and Carla leapt off the sofa with a dramatic twist of the waist that made her dress swing around in a wide sweep.
Andy yelled, “Cut!”
Charley had learned by now that there would be no second take. It took a hell of a screw-up for Andy to waste precious film on multiple takes, and even then he sometimes kept what he had. There was low-budget, and there was no-budget, and then there was Andy. And yet everyone who didn’t hate his guts really seemed to love him. Charley was beginning to feel it too, although he really couldn’t see why. He doubted anyone could.
Now Andy went in for the close shot of the scene’s grisly finish. Carla whisked herself over to the slapdash mantel Andy had built and installed over the fireplace. Off camera, Jim called to her. Carla turned around just in time for the four rusty tines of the pitchfork to edge into the frame. Carla gasped and threw up her hands the way distressed maidens used to do in silent melodramas as the tines drew closer to her neck. The Perils of Carla. Andy stopped filming and brought his camera down to his waist.
“Goddamnit, cut!”
“What’s wrong, Andy?” Carla cooed. “I can ratchet it up, if you like.”
“Christ, Jim! You’re not gonna tickle her with the fucking thing. Stab her, goddamnit! Right in the throat!”
Jim blanched.
“But Andy…”
“Do you even understand this scene at all? He’s killing her! So fucking kill her!”
“Maybe we need, I don’t know, a rubber pitchfork? Something not so dangerous?”
“Art is dangerous, you dumb shit,” Andy growled.
“But haven’t you got a dummy for the gory stuff?”
Andy almost threw the Auricon across the room. His arm went back, but he caught himself at the last second and carefully set it down on the mantel.
“Maybe you think I should go take a walk and let you direct this picture? Is that it, Jim? You’re the master director now? Pretty, stupid Jim, the next Hitchcock? Let me tell you something, sweetie—you aren’t in my film because you’re any good or even because I like you. You’re a doll, you truly are. A gorgeous hunk of worthless meat, but beautifully arranged. You are going to look great in this Jimmy, but only if you shut your fucking mouth!”
Everyone shuddered, all but Andy. He was perfectly calm now that it was out of his system. He picked the Auricon back up and returned to his position, ready to finish the scene.
“Drive it hard and fast, right at the neck. Just don’t forget to stop just before we end up with a snuff film, okay?” Jim nodded, the magazine whirred and Andy bellowed, “Scene!”
Carla whirled around, just as she had before, and when Andy gestured blindly to Jim with his free h
and the rattled actor lunged forward with the pitchfork. Carla let out a weak yelp and jumped out of the way as Jim drove the sharp tines right into the wall. The rusty metal scraped the floral wallpaper away in four six-inch grooves that would have been gushing gashes in Carla’s throat had she not moved in time.
Predictably, Andy was incensed.
“For Christ’s sakes!” he roared. “Are you trying to ruin my film?”
“He nearly killed me, Andy!” Carla sobbed.
Jim just stood there, dazed and looking every bit as stupid as Andy said he was. Charley gently set the boom mike down on the floor and went over to check on Carla, who had begun to tremble. More histrionics, Charley thought, but it didn’t hurt to put in a little time with her.
Andy stamped his feet and screamed so hard that tears formed at the corners of his eyes.
“Out!” he bellowed. “Everybody out! The film is dead! I hope you are all happy, because you killed my film!”
Charley sighed and said, “Andy, come on…”
“No! It’s done, it’s over. I can’t do this anymore. Just get the hell out.”
Charley escorted Carla to the door. She acted like she really needed him to. Jim shuffled his massive feet out onto the porch, and Carla followed him out. Charley was about to go, too, but Andy piped up: “Charley, wait. Come back.”
He shut the door after Carla and slowly walked back across the room to where the erstwhile enfant terrible had collapsed onto his divan.
“It’s too much, Charley. I gotta get out of here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m going to leave. I really mean it this time. I’m going to go to California and die there.”
“Jesus, Andy.”
“Fifteen years I’ve been making films just so Rosenthal can throw them up in some shithole like the Anco and pull them after half a week. Then nothing. Then I do it again. Why fucking bother?”
