by Stuart Woods
“I can see how that might be.”
“We’ll have an office for you here this afternoon. I think it’s a good idea to have an office on each coast, and you’re going to need an apartment in New York, of course. If you want to buy, instead of rent, we’ll help with that. Also, Eddie has bought an apartment at the Carlyle for the studio, and you can stay there until you’ve found a permanent place.”
“I don’t think I want to buy until we’re sure this thing is going to work,” Sid said. “I don’t want to dig in, only to find out after a few months that we’re being cancelled.”
“As you wish.”
Someone had approached their table, and Rick looked up to see Tom Terry. “Hi, Tom. Have you met Sid Brooks?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Sid, this is Tom Terry, our head of studio security. Tom, Sid is going to be running a new two-hour live drama TV show for us in New York, but he’ll be out here some of the time, too.”
“Welcome aboard,” Tom said, handing Sid a card. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”
“Any news on the search for P. J. O’Toole?” Rick asked.
“Nothing new this morning, but…” Suddenly, Tom stopped talking and was staring across the room, looking stunned.
“Is something wrong, Tom?” Rick asked.
“My God,” Tom said.
“Tom, what is it?”
“Everything just fell into place. Rick, please follow me; I may need you.”
“What for?”
“To make an arrest.” Tom strode off across the large room.
Rick excused himself and followed, wondering what the hell was going on. Tom seemed to be headed for a table where a lone man was just sitting down.
“Jerry!” Tom said. “How are you?”
Jerry, the driver, looked up. “Hi, Tom. I’m great, thanks.”
“Jerry, have you met our head of production, Rick Barron?” Rick had just arrived at the table.
Jerry got to his feet and held out his hand.
“Rick this is Jerry…I’m sorry, Jerry, I don’t know your last name.” Jerry shook Rick’s hand.
“O’Toole,” Jerry said, shaking Rick’s hand.
“Peter Jerome O’Toole?”
“Patrick Jerome.” Jerry turned and offered Tom his hand.
“I thought something like that,” Tom said, taking hold of Jerry’s outstretched hand and pinning his wrist to the table.
Jerry looked alarmed, and then he suddenly understood what was happening. “Let me go,” he said, trying to free his hand.
“You killed her, didn’t you?”
Jerry’s expression turned to panic.
“What are you talking about?”
“You drove her all week long, got to know her, got to want her, didn’t you? You waited for her at the house on that Sunday, and when she arrived, you came on to her. When she resisted, you dragged her around behind the garage, where you beat her and raped her in the bed of ferns. When she tried to scream you strangled her. Rick, frisk Jerry, will you?”
Rick started around the table, but Jerry reached under his jacket with his left hand and produced a revolver. Before Rick could reach him he had fired twice at Tom and had started running.
Tom fell backward onto the floor, clutching his belly. Panic ensued in the commissary, women screamed, people ran from the building.
Sid Brooks had run across the room and joined Rick, who was kneeling over Tom. “Sid,” Rick said, “do what you can to help Tom.” He grabbed a waitress who was running by. “You call the doctor at our infirmary, then call an ambulance and the police. Hurry! Sid, I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Rick ran from the building and looked up and down the studio street. Two blocks down, he saw Jerry O’Toole sprinting down the street, then taking a right turn. Rick grabbed a passing man in cowboy gear. “I’m Rick Barron. Find a phone, call the front gate and tell them to seal it. Nobody gets out, got it?”
“Okay,” the man said.
“And be quick about it.” Rick ran after Jerry. A block down he passed the studio doctor and a nurse in an electric cart headed toward the commissary. Rick turned right, where Jerry had turned, and suddenly found himself on a New York City street, the studio’s most-used standing set.
Jerry was nowhere in sight.
60
Rick rounded a corner and began to limp. He wasn’t used to running without his knee brace, and his old war wound was starting to hurt. Halfway down the block a crew was setting up a street shot. Two police cars were blocking the street, and actors in cop uniforms were standing around, leaning against the cars and waiting for shooting to start.
Rick limped up to them. “Did you see a man run into this street?” he asked the group.
“Who are you?” an assistant director asked.
“I’m Rick Barron, and I run this studio. Answer my question.”
“I didn’t see anybody,” the AD said.
One of the actor/cops spoke up. “I saw a guy down at the end of the block where you just came from, but I looked away, and when I looked back he was gone.”
“Give me your gun,” Rick said.
The actor pulled his .38 from his holster and handed it to Rick. Rick opened the cylinder and extracted a cartridge, a blank, as he had expected. “Where’s the armorer?” he asked.
The actor turned and shouted at a man on the other side of his police car. “Hey, Frankie! The boss wants to talk to you.”
A man trotted over to the car. “Yeah?”
“Have you got any live ammo?” Rick asked.
The man shook his head. “Not here. I’d have to go back to the armory.”
“Go,” Rick said. “I need a box of .38 specials and fast, and call the studio police and tell them to get some armed men over here.”
The man hopped into an electric cart and raced away.
Rick could hear a siren from the direction of the main gate, then other sirens. That would be the ambulance and the cops. “You,” he said to the AD, “grab a cart, get to the main gate and lead the cops back here, and be quick.”
The AD drove away.
“What’s going on?” one of the actors asked.
“There was just a shooting at the commissary,” Rick said. “The shooter ran this way, and he’s got to be found.”
“Can we help?”
“The man is armed, and you’ve only got blanks.”
“I’m an off-duty cop,” one of the men said. “I work as an extra sometimes. What do you need?”
“Live ammo,” Rick said.
“Here comes the armorer,” somebody shouted.
The man screeched to a halt in his cart and handed Rick a box of ammunition. He gave some to the off-duty cop. “Okay, load up and let’s start searching. Remember, this guy has already shot one man, so be careful.”
“Okay. I’m with you.”
“You take the shopfronts on the right; I’ll take the brownstones on the left.” Rick ran down the street as best he could and started checking doors on the brownstone mock-ups. The first three were locked.
“Everything over here is locked!” the off-duty cop yelled.
“Keep trying, and be careful.”
There was only one brownstone left at the end of the row. Rick got up the stairs, turned the doorknob and pushed. The knob turned, but the door was stuck at the bottom. Rick leaned against it and pushed; it swung open. Rick simultaneously stepped over the threshold and found nothing but air on the other side.
He clung to the doorknob with his left hand and looked down into a large hole in the ground, perhaps twenty feet below. Rick had a loud taxi whistle, and he used it. “Help me!” he yelled. He stuck the .38 into his belt and tried to swing the door shut, but it was stuck, and there was no room on the doorknob for two hands. He swung his body toward the door opening and got one foot on it, then swung back. He was starting to lose his grip on the knob.
Then the off-duty cop appeared in the doorway, grabbed Ric
k’s trouser leg and pulled him in until he could get a hand on Rick’s belt, then on Rick’s right hand. He braced himself against the doorway. “Let go!” he yelled. “I’ve got you.”
Rick’s hand slipped off the doorknob, and the man took all his weight, pulling him into the doorway. A second later he was safe but out of breath.
“Is that your guy?” the off-duty cop asked, pointing down.
Rick looked into the abyss and saw a man, lying face down, at the bottom, his revolver nearby. “That’s the guy,” he puffed.
Real police cars turned into the street, and cops began spilling out.
“Go around,” Rick directed from the top of the brownstone’s steps. “The guy is in a construction hole on the other side, and he seems to be unconscious, but his gun is there, too, so be careful.”
A sergeant directed his men toward the rear of the set, then trotted up the stairs and looked down. “Jesus,” he said, “did the guy run up here and through the door?”
“That seems to be it,” Rick said. “He shot our head of security twice in the commissary, then ran here.”
“Tom Terry?” the man asked.
“That’s right.” Rick heard the ambulance heading back toward the main gate, and he knew Tom was on his way to the hospital.
“You look a little winded,” the cop said. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m all right.”
The cop took the .38 from Rick’s belt. “Can I have this, then?”
“Yeah. It belongs to the studio, but you can unload it.”
The off-duty cop opened the cylinder of his gun and emptied the live ammunition into his hand. “I’m on the job,” he said to the other cop, “just moonlighting here a little.” He turned to Rick. “You used to be on the job, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Rick said. “I did, and I’m glad I’m not anymore. Will you call the front gate and tell them they can open up again?” The man left, and Rick looked down into the pit where the cops had reached Jerry O’Toole. “Is he alive?” Rick yelled.
“He’s alive,” somebody yelled back, “but we’re gonna need a stretcher and some rope to get him out of here.”
“I’ll take care of that,” the sergeant said, then left.
Rick walked down the steps of the brownstone and sat on the bottom one to get his breath back. An electric cart driven by Sid Brooks came around the corner and stopped.
“You okay?”
“I’m okay. How’s Tom?”
“The doctor said he wasn’t too bad; only one shot hit him and not in a fatal place, apparently. The ambulance took him away.”
“Good.”
“Rick, what was that all about?”
“The guy who shot Tom killed Susie Stafford. The police are taking him away now.”
“Well, I’m glad nobody got killed.”
“Just Susie,” Rick said, “and a woman named Hank Harmon.”
Rick got home on time, after visiting Tom Terry in the hospital, where he was recovering from surgery. His eldest daughter climbed into his lap. Glenna was holding the baby.
“Did you have a good day?” she asked.
“All in all, pretty good,” Rick said. He started telling her about it.
EPILOGUE
1999
Rick Barron stood with a small group of people and an Episcopal priest in the marble hall of a mausoleum at Forest Lawn Cemetery. Glenna stood next to him, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. The casket was slid expertly into the crypt, like a file drawer into its cabinet, and a man used a battery-operated drill to screw in a series of bolts, sealing the marble slab. Etched into the slab was:
VANCE CALDER
1928–19991
Rows of similar crypts lined both sides of the hall, each with a legend of its own.
Rick was eighty-seven years old, and Glenna was eighty-four; they were great-grandparents. It was hard for Rick to believe that Vance had been seventy-one; he had looked older than his age when Glenna had spotted him at their construction site in 1947, and, remarkably, as he aged into his forties, Vance began to look younger than his age. That was a pretty good trick, Rick thought, especially if you were a movie star, perhaps the biggest ever. Vance had won his first Academy Award for Bitter Creek, the first of five Oscars and twelve nominations. Rick had won, too, as had the cinematographer. Susie Stafford had been nominated.
Vance’s young widow, Arrington, walked over to them, leading a man who appeared to be in his early forties. “Thank you for coming to the cemetery, Rick, Glenna.”
There had already been a very large funeral on a soundstage at Centurion, but only a handful of invited guests had come to the cemetery.
“I’d like you to meet my friend, Stone Barrington, who is a lawyer, from New York. Stone has been very helpful over the last week, since Vance’s death. Stone, this is Rick and Glenna Barron. Rick is the chairman of Centurion Studios, and Glenna is one of its greatest stars.”
“How do you do,” Barrington said, shaking hands with them both.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Stone,” Rick said. “I’ve been hearing about you.”
Arrington looked around. “There’s a place here for me, too,” she said, “next to Vance. He told me he bought these crypts fifty years ago. I suppose it’s a peaceful place to rest.” She turned to Rick and Glenna. “Do you need a lift home?” she asked.
“No, we have our car,” Rick replied. “You go ahead. I know you must be tired. Good to meet you, Stone.”
The two walked away, but Rick and Glenna remained for a moment. “Funny how everybody seemed to end up in this place,” Rick said. “Eddie and Suzanne Harris are right down there,” he said, pointing. Eddie had died of a stroke nearly ten years before, and Suzanne the year after. “Sol Weinman and his wife are a little farther down. It’s like Centurion Hall. And Leo Goldman, too.” Leo had blown his own brains out in what was thought to have been an accident, during the late eighties.2 His wife had remarried soon afterward. Tom Terry had recovered from his gunshot wounds and was still alive in an old-age home out in the valley, having lost both legs to diabetes. Jerry O’Toole had been sent to the gas chamber at San Quentin in 1952.
Vance had died the largest stockholder in Centurion as well as its biggest star, having bought Sol Weinman’s widow’s shares. Leo had been a big stockholder, too, and upon his death, Rick had bought his shares from his widow.
“Yes,” Glenna said. “It’s Centurion Hall, and we have slots down there somewhere,” she said pointing.
“I forgot,” Rick said. “You ready to go home?”
But Glenna wasn’t listening to him. Instead, she was staring at another crypt. She moved closer. “Come here, Rick, and take a look at this,” she said.
Rick walked to her side and looked at the marble slab covering the crypt next to Vance’s. The legend read:
SUSAN ANNE STAFFORD
1924–1948
“And this one,” Glenna said, pointing to the next one down.
HENRIETTA “HANK” HARMON
1922–1948
“My word,” Rick said. “Do you suppose this is a coincidence?”
Glenna shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“I remember that Susie’s mother had said that funeral arrangements were being made for her in L.A. by a friend. I suppose that friend must have been Hank Harmon, who then joined her.”
“Are you ready to go to Malibu?” They had moved into the beach house full time after the girls were grown.
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
They stood for a moment in silence, then the two old people turned and walked slowly toward their waiting car.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I am happy to hear from readers, but you should know that if you write to me in care of my publisher, three to six months will pass before I receive your letter, and when it finally arrives it will be one among many, and I will not be able to reply.
However, if you have access to the Internet, you ma
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If you send me an e-mail and do not receive a reply, it is because you are among an alarming number of people who have entered their e-mail address incorrectly in their mail software. I have many of my replies returned as undeliverable.
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