“Have you come to ask about Charlene Glades?” asked Clavius. “Hideous, what befell her. Barbaric. Grief like this is draining.”
“Actually, sir, I’ve come to ask you about Elias McCabe.” Stoner had begun a tight circle pace on the far side of the desk, like a prosecutor summing up. “You said that he was acting erratically the last time you saw him.”
“Detective, ‘erratic’ is one word. It is a word. It does not adequately encompass how upset McCabe seemed to be, how wild and distraught. It immediately seemed to me that he was losing his grip on sanity. He babbled, quite frankly, about an internecine plot to implicate him in … what? A blackmail? A murder? I’m still not sure myself—that’s how crazy he seemed. It was as though he was confecting a melodrama: He was abducted, forced to take photographs, bribed, then attacked in some arcane retribution, so he said. The sole proof he had of any of this were some obviously staged photographs and a bit of muddy videotape, which he put on my Web site, thereby implicating me. Worse, he cast me into an uncomfortable position with a magazine by failing to do his job. Then people began to die. It looks very bad for him, doesn’t it? Running and hiding. Elias was never the bravest of men, Detective, if you’ll pardon that observation.”
“Where would he run?” asked Stoner. “Where would he hide?”
“Well, that all depends on his measure of guilt, yes? If he has lost his mind to the point of taking people’s lives, who can say? If he is innocent and is merely cowering in some squalid hideout, who knows where he went? He had an obvious alcohol and drug dependency. His lover had just walked out on him. Perhaps he was despondent to the degree he would make harsh, rash, impulsive decisions you or I could not even theorize. He wasn’t always that way. He was talented and reliable. But now…”
“What happened to Charlene Glades was clearly done by a lunatic, sir,” Stoner said, withdrawing a legal folder from a vinyl folio case he had brought in. “Patterned after one of McCabe’s own photographs. Would you like me to show you the pictures?”
Clavius got redder. “No, sir, I would not.”
Stoner was good—he had laid back and let Clavius do the talking, then ambushed him with crime scene shots he knew Clavius would never look at, all to gauge his reactions. He shot that last “sir” back at Clavius like a bolt from a crossbow.
“This is all very upsetting to me,” added Clavius, unable to keep from filling dead air. “Char was a treasure. Tell me, can you with your discerning eye make anything of the fact that the artwork that provided the template for her murder—it was called Targets #5—was missing from Elias’s loft, when the atrocities that were committed there were discovered?”
“We don’t know that it was in the loft at all,” said Stoner. I could tell the detective was jonesing for a cigarette up here in the sterile bird’s nest.
“It certainly was the last time I spoke to Elias.”
“Hmm. Did you take it?”
Clavius permitted himself a small, lipless smile. “No.”
“Then where is it?”
“He may have sold it. It’s useless as a direct link anyway, I think. You see, several articles were done on that showing; the image was available in a number of places, even my own Web site.”
Clavius folded his hands on the desk. He seemed to be taking inventory of his fingers. Yep, all there. “Detective, I need to know if I am suspected in any aspect of this crime. Public speculation has already proven most damaging, and my legal team is very costly. They require me to submit to little interrogations, just like you’re doing now, and this absorbs very valuable time and wastes further time in the processing of extreme stress. So, if you please—am I to be accused of anything? If so, then arrest me. If not, and I am very sorry, but I don’t think I can help you. I last saw Elias over two weeks ago. He was unstable and semidelirious. I’ve since had to waste an enormous amount of time getting those troublesome photos off the Internet, and that in turn has caused me to fall grievously behind in preparation for a very important show.”
Yeah, Clavius was really broken up about Char, all right. I was amazed he could still remember her last name. What he was hoping was that one more week would erase the whole Internet embarrassment to the attention-deficit world at large.
“The photos are not the issue,” Clavius went on. “The special paper makes them unviewable online. But they were linked to my Web site, and hence that distressing video clip. I am being involved totally outside my own control, don’t you see?”
“That’s it,” said Stoner. “You saw him. I did not. All I need is the benefit of your eye, don’t you see?”
“I wish I could tell you more,” said Clavius, already looking for other things to do. “Who really knows, Detective, what happens in someone’s mind when it goes wrong? You would be more of an expert than I. He may have suffered some sort of traumatic break, changed into some schizophrenic alter ego.”
“That’s not schizophrenia,” Stoner said, just politely enough to make me start hiccupping with suppressed laughter.
Any thoughtful police work generates metric tons of paperwork. Everything has to be written down. There were three damning points of connection in what was turning into a cross-country case: Elias McCabe’s association with Clavius, the loft that Clavius paid for out of petty cash, and the damning fact that Elias had been screwing both Clavius’s ex, Nasja, and her replacement, Char. Both were now dead, among others, and Elias had chosen to run. It appeared Clavius’s primary concern was scraping Elias off his shoe, but not to the point of killing anyone. Accustomed to calling the shots, Clavius had found himself mired in a scenario over which he had no control, and he was obviously afraid for his life. It must have been driving him buggy.
I had wanted to redefine Clavius in my own mind as relevant enough to kill as part of my unilateral expungement of the Dominic Sharps abortion. But no one in the real world gave a damn who Clavius was. And Clavius barely had any facts at all, and most of those were thirdhand, so what he had said was the truth as far as he knew it. I could feel Stoner’s dilemma: it would be hard to make Clavius a suspect even if he was guilty of something other than being an asshole, which unfortunately was not illegal.
The meeting was already over. Stoner redonned his footwear and left his card. Once he was out of the building, I came out of my hiding place.
I stowed Stoner’s mustache and wig in my vinyl folio along with his fake ID. I thought the gun had been a nice touch, though it went unappreciated. Most members of the largest police force in the United States, or “MOS” (Men in the Service) to the NYPD, were authorized to carry nine-millimeter SIGS, Smith & Wessons, or Glocks, all adjusted to a twelve-pound trigger pull. Bulldog’s SIG filled that bill perfectly.
I was sorry I had not gotten the chance to make Stoner really bitch-slap Clavius with the photos of Char, which I had taken myself. Not bad shots, either, for a beginner.
Clavius wasn’t worth killing. A bloated, egomaniacal, purple-veined Nazi helmet boner, yes, but not worth the bother of killing. Unlike the others, his death would draw serious attention. Unlike the others, he was not relevant in the least to my inquiries.
That left Elias.
Being an artist, I had discovered, was no great leap. Elias did still lifes. I did “stilled lives,” or perhaps could call my photos “steal lifes.” Elias’s work had inspired me and I would liked to have thought my work as good as his. We were both artists now.
* * *
Once Joey had blurted out that Elias had fled to New York, Joey did not need to be alive anymore. When I shot him in the head, his face detached from hydrostatic pressure and skinned above his brows in a single flap, held together by all his little pins and studs and things. It was an anomaly; I don’t think I could have done that on purpose in a thousand more tries.
Once Char had blurted out that Elias’s movie connection was a man with the laughable name of Tripp—“Bergman. Bergen. Something like that”—all I had to do to find him was look him up on the Internet Movie Dat
abase. Under in production, but not rumored, was something titled Vengeance Is.
Currently filming in New York and New Jersey, with a unit production manager named Tripp Bergin.
After getting nothing out of Clavius, just noodling around sniffing for causal links, I linked onto a hot item about some British director’s temper tantrum on the set of Vengeance Is, currently a busy YouTube tidbit. It was not luck—I don’t believe in luck—so much as thoroughness.
If Tripp Bergin was hiding Elias, and Elias had changed his appearance—no goatee when I think I spotted him stalking Char, too late—then Elias could be any of the hundred-plus warm bodies on that film crew.
Elias could run, but not from me. It just made the chase more interesting. And I had never been on a film set before in my life. Neither, from the look of it, had many of the people working on the movie. It seemed as though twenty-odd bystanders did nothing except mumble into mobiles or text message the entire time. Which was good, since it meant I stood a better chance of blending in unobtrusively.
I kitted out for this excursion in jeans, running shoes, and a thick denim work shirt. If nothing else, I looked durable. A small hardware-store work belt pendent with a cell phone holster, a web water-bottle sleeve, and a utility pack (weighted down with Bulldog’s SIG) made me appear hipslung. I later found out that many of the crew wore steel-toed footwear—sandals or anything open-fronted was prohibited because of the perfidious mantraps that litter a working set: cables, wheeled frames for flats, unexpected sharp edges, and camera dollies that could crush bones with their casters. If you try to navigate this maze in the dark you might as well be dancing through a minefield.
The ID lanyard was a tiny bit more complicated since there was no time or opportunity to forge crew cards. Set security was perpetually on the lookout for signs of your legitimacy. At first I thought to plead guest status. I had prepared an identity as Jack Vickers, a New Jersey public safety officer assigned as observer to prevent a repeat of Mason Stone’s Night of Thunder. One phone call would obliterate that façade, so I snaked around for options and soon found the cramped trailer command post for the first, second and third ADs. Most of them had to be on set, so watch duty in this overstuffed capsule of phones, walkie chargers, fax and copy machines, usually fell to one or two busy souls who stepped in and out for coffee, smokes, and bathroom breaks so often that the door was never closed. I stood around smoking until a guy who looked about fifteen, belted with three walkies, battery packs, and three phones, answered his nature call. Then I ascended the aluminum drop steps into the office as though I expected to see someone there.
I snatched a lanyard from a hooked bundle of about twenty. It was not a key card—no mag stripe. All I needed to do was emplace a trim of one of my utility ID shots and seal the front with clear packing tape from my kit. The background would not matter; most of the card pictures of the crew looked like candids.
This was before I realized that so long as you appear to know what you are doing, practically nobody would question your presence anyway.
I saw several uniformed Jersey cops, all overweight, moonlighting as set security, dallying near the craft services table and trying to chat up anything remotely female. They hovered, unconcerned by interlopers. Another knot of people in bike wear and logoed jackets hung together in a clannish circle of portable chairs near the big doors to the hangar like a tribe protective of their campfire. These were an element of the stunt team, awaiting their various summonses.
An AD outside the hangar called, “Rolling,” in a town crier voice. The background noise of circular saws and hammers terminated and everybody stopped talking. A lot of people froze in place as though waiting to be reactivated. I became absurdly aware of the crunch of my shoes on gravel and decided to hold still. There was a roar like an aircraft engine emitting from the hangar, shouting, and the unmistakable sound of gunfire. I’m not sure how the microphones inside were vulnerable to the sound of me walking, forty yards away from that cacophony, but it was just how things were done.
On “cut” the peripheral activity resumed. Good to know. A billow of brown dust was roiling out of the big hangar doors.
Inside was a piece of Manhattan street, stoplights and all, crowded with lights and cherry-pickers and several enormous Ritter fans about eight feet across at the blade. A trashed ambulance was on its side, plowed into a mailbox, newspaper vending machines, and a tilted light pole, its flashers still cycling. A collapsed gurney in the middle of the road. As I got closer I noticed I was stepping on spent shell casings. Somebody wailed on a bullhorn, calling, “Back to one, reset, quickly now.”
“Hi!” The voice behind me came with a light touch on my arm. In here, people really had to stay aware in a three-sixty sense—semidarkness, workers ghosting through with ladders saying, “Watch your backs,” tricky footwork all over the concrete floor. “Who might you be?”
I turned to meet a short blond woman with wide, guileless eyes of cornflower blue, lozenge-shaped red-framed glasses, a high-wattage PR smile, and a slightly hefty, saucy, low-slung carriage that said she could easily prop her heels behind her head if she thought you were worthy.
Defensively, my hand sought my lanyard. “Jack Vickers,” I said. “I’m with Public Safety.”
“Oh!” Her brow furrowed—adorable—but she quickly grabbed my handshake. “You were here yesterday, right?”
I nodded. Sure I was.
“We’re not in trouble, right?” Her grin was semiconspiratorial.
Put her at ease, I thought. “No, no, it’s not that, it’s just … I like watching. What was your name again? I’m so sorry; my brain for names is like a wicker sieve.”
“Spooky,” she said. Again the eye-roll, as though we were sharing a confidence. “I know, I know … it really is Spooky. Spooky Sellers, how’s that for fake Hollywood? Except that I’m probably the only person here that hasn’t changed my name. And weirdly enough, I’m not the only publicist named Spooky. How likely is that?”
Her sped-up patter made it clear that if one did not interject, she would quickly fill the conversational gap with more fragments attached to spin-out phrases.
“Well, how’s it going so far today, Spooky?”
“Light duty.” She sighed. “Had the EPK guys in yesterday. Actually it’s a slow day for publicity. Meat and potatoes.” She shrugged as if awaiting a better offer. She was wearing a logo cap that read ANTI-AUTHORITY.
“What part is this?” I said, indicating the urban mayhem setup.
“Oh, umm … that would be … shoot-out, second guy from hell tries to take the ambulance Walker is in, postcrash, second Hell Guy summons a dust devil from 1848 to help him, that blows the pedestrians back, and Walker and Hell Guy number two draw down in the street. Hmm. The hydrant is supposed to be gushing.”
As if on her cue, the decapitated fire hydrant beneath the wrecked ambulance began to emit a plume of water. Somebody on a megaphone said sardonically, “Thanks for coming to work today, Bernie, love ya!” General laughter.
“And Walker is Mason Stone?”
“In the flesh. He was here this morning; I think they’re doing reverse angles now.”
Walker had also been the false middle name of the nonexistent person who had polished off Charlene Glades’s life.
“Why aren’t they just shooting this on a street in the city?” I said.
“Better control of the dust cloud,” she said. “Outside, dust and fog are the worst; your clouds just drift away; control of the light is more consistent.”
Now I could see, through the haze and gloom, that most of the crew were bandanaed and goggled, or wearing paper filter masks. Several guys behind the big fans had the duty of shoveling dust into the fans to blow around from large dumps on the floor.
“You mean they just blow dirt all over their high-priced actors?”
“Actually, it’s peat moss,” she said. “Better ‘granularity’ for dust. Healthier, too. For actual dirt, ground cork. Hey, be sure your
mobile is off if you’re in here.”
“No worries,” I said. Then a guy with a live vulture on his arm walked right past me.
“Vlad hates the dust storm, as it turns out,” said Spooky. “Animals are always a bitch to work with during physical effects.”
“Is that a real vulture?” I had never seen one up close. It looked like it wanted to kill everybody.
“Yeah, Hunnicutt has got three of ’em.”
“So the vulture has two … understudies?”
“Oh, yeah, if one won’t work, you can’t just stop.”
I got the clear impression that Spooky the Publicist was grateful to have somebody to talk to today, which meant that the main unit probably blew her off unless they needed something.
It did not take her long to fasten on her real interest.
“So,” she said, “Despite all the logistics, big scene and all, they’re actually going to wrap on time today. And I hope you don’t mind me asking, but…”
* * *
Recent personal history had it that Spooky Sellers had confessed an attraction for Garrett Torres, the second lead in Vengeance Is, who had been more interested in delving the girly parts of one Aspen DeLint, a clapper-loader, which itself just sounded like a dirty joke. Ms. DeLint had a boyfriend, she had lugubriously announced, slapping Mr. Torres’s down harder than she had intended, in front of several other crew members. In retaliation, Mr. Torres had recently begun to impugn the professional abilities of Ms. DeLint in the hope that Tripp Bergin might fire her worthless, though hydraulic, ass. Now they had escalated to eye-daggering each other during every setup.
Some sets are all business, some are divertingly flirty, and some are downright horny. Spooky had flirted off and on with Torres, but he wasn’t interested in a mere publicist, so he froze her out. Spooky admitted to me she had pointed the set videographer at Torres during the unfortunate makeup moment that turned up live on the Internet. Of course she had not intended for it to go that far, and still felt a bit guilty about it.
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