KW 09:Shot on Location

by Laurence Shames

  She reached for a candy, pulled her hand back.

  “But it wasn’t only that. His group, his world, it excited me. For a while. I admit it. Champagne, hundred dollar bills. Plus I told myself the usual bullshit — he wasn’t like the others, there was something gentle, something good deep down. The crazy part is that I still believe that. I really do.” She shifted in bed and the arm-trapeze squeaked. “Okay, half-believe it.”

  Jake said, “I want to find him.”

  “You’re crazy. Forget it.”

  “What’s his last name?”

  “You think I’m going to tell you? Give it up.”

  “I want to find out why he did this.”

  “Why? Come on, that would be the easy part. To Ace, you’re either winning or you’re losing. I dumped him, I threw him out. At that point he was losing. Now maybe he’s the one that hurt me. He’s winning again. So let’s let it stay right there. He wins. Game over.”

  Jake shook his head so vigorously that his hair rose up above his ears. “No, that isn’t good enough.”

  “For me it is.”

  “For me it isn’t. Look, you can’t have a world where people go around running each other over with speedboats and getting away with it.”

  “You can’t? Except you do. Welcome to south Florida.”

  “But even here —”

  “Even here, what? Listen, does it strike you as strange at all that the cops have shown like zero interest in what happened?”

  Fumbling for an explanation, Jake said, “No one got a good look at the boat. They couldn’t identify it.”

  “Or maybe they could,” said Donna. “Maybe they know whose boat it was and they don’t want to touch it. That ever occur to you?”

  To Jake in his innocence it hadn’t.

  “The guy Ace works for, he’s a powerful guy,” she went on. “Ships stolen cars to South America. Turns the proceeds into drugs. Does loansharking. Has an arson and insurance racket. Spreads lots of money around. The cops leave him alone and Christ knows you should too.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jake, just stop! I’m not telling you his name and I don’t want you getting involved.”

  Quietly but stubbornly, Jake said, “I’ll find out who he is.”

  “Great, Sherlock. Do that. Then what? You start poking around and you end up in the hospital. Is that really what you want?”

  She fixed him with a ferocious look but it was the word hospital that really got to him, imparted a queasy reality to the conversation, gave it the sour yellow smell of gore and the grinding texture of ripped ligaments and shattered bone. Playing off Jake’s flustered silence, she pressed on. “Listen, I’m getting out of here tomorrow. Having some nice paid vacation. By next week I’ll be doing physio. By next month I’ll be good as new. No problemo. Like this fucking little mishap never happened. So will you please just leave it there?”

  He thought about it for a moment, saw the bulge in her side where her wound was dressed, heard the little hamster-wheel squeak of the swing from which her arm was suspended. Then he said, “No. I’m sorry but I can’t. I can’t just leave it there.”

  22.

  Riding a taxi back to town, Jake found Joey Goldman’s business card in his wallet and called him up. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, he said, “Joey, I have kind of a strange question for you. I’m trying to find somebody. Or somebody’s name at least. Donna’s old boyfriend’s boss. I think he’s some kind of gangster in Miami.”

  Not exactly defensively but certainly not without a bit of caution, Joey said, “What makes you think I’d know?”

  With equal discretion, Jake said, “You just seem to know what’s what down here. And your old friend Bert —”

  “You trying to play detective or something?”

  “No. Maybe. Sort of.”

  “So who is this guy you’re looking for?”

  “Some bigshot. Ships stolen cars, burns down buildings —”

  Joey cut him off. “Whoa, whoa. You don’t talk about shit like this on the telephone. That’s pretty basic, Jake.”

  “Sorry. I’m learning as I go along.”

  “You had lunch yet?”

  Jake said that he hadn’t. He hadn’t even noticed it was lunchtime.

  “Meet me at the Eclipse Saloon. You know the place?”

  Jake said that he didn’t.

  “Simonton Street. Ask any local. See you there in half an hour.”

  ---

  On the set of Adrift, Claire and Jacqueline Mayfield, the publicist, were standing on the periphery, witnessing what had been a rather sluggish and out-of-rhythm morning, rather like the first day back at school after a long vacation. Even though only a single day of shooting had been skipped, a certain momentum had been lost, the flow interrupted. Actors had a tough time finding their tone, honing their gestures, recapturing the attitudes they’d seemed to have mastered weeks before. Take after take was shot and discarded or just hacked off at some failed point in the middle.

  It didn’t help that Candace McBride kept muffing her lines.

  Now and then she missed a cue. Once she skipped a speech ahead so that the conversation made no sense. Other times she faked it, just plain guessing at what her line might be. Once or twice she opened her mouth and nothing came out.

  Finally, having yelled Cut for what seemed to him the hundredth time that day, the director gave vent to his exasperation. He stormed over to his diva, holding some papers high above his head and waving them in a quick tight circle.

  “Candace, my dear, you see these pages? Collectively, they are called a script. The script is made of words. Your job is to memorize those words and speak them in a certain predetermined sequence with your fellow actors. Can you try to do that for me, Candace? Please?”

  At that point Candace lost it.

  Her losing it was not especially surprising. It happened often. But even by the star’s high standards this was a spectacular meltdown. She snarled, she flared her nostrils, she balled her fists and stamped her feet. She hissed and mocked, but what was different about this outburst was that it seemed aimed not just at the director who’d dared to scold her, but at everyone around her. “Listen, you little asshole,” she began, “you count for nothing, there are ten thousand hungry little B-listers who could do your job, and I am carrying this show. That’s right, carrying it. On the screen and now in all these fucking interviews. I’m the one that people want to see. I’m up at fucking dawn, working at midnight, shilling my guts out while the rest of you are … what? Eating lobsters, chasing little boys? You don’t know the strain I’m under. I barely had time to look at the piece of shit script, let alone memorize it. You can all go straight to hell for all I care.”

  And she bolted through the mangroves and the palm trees toward her tent.

  For a moment no one breathed. Jacqueline Mayfield said very softly to Claire, “Christ, I’ve created a monster.”

  “No,” Claire said. “She was a monster already. But you’ve definitely made it worse.”

  ---

  “Sounds like Charlie Ponte,” Bert was saying. “Don’t you think it sounds like Charlie Ponte?”

  “Hey, you’re the maven,” Joey said, “but yeah, to me it sounds like Ponte.”

  Jake said nothing, just swiveled his head from one of them to the other and thought about the name. The syllables alone seemed a little frightening. Charlie Ponte. The hard consonants, the curt rhythm; it sounded like something being beaten with a pipe.

  They were sitting at the bar at the Eclipse Saloon, near a wall festooned with dead mounted sailfish and tarpon, eating grouper sandwiches that leaked slivers of onion and bits of mushroom from the edges of the roll. They’d chosen the bar rather than a table so Bert could sneak in his dog. Dogs were not allowed but Bert had snuck his in for as long as anybody could remember. Everybody knew the dog was there, nestled in Bert’s lap beneath the overhanging padded lip of the bar; nobody seemed to care.

 
“Course,” the old man resumed, “just saying that it’s Ponte, what the fuck does that do for us? It’s not like we could just drop by or call him up.”

  “Why not?” said Jake.

  “Why not?” echoed Bert. He seemed to find the question funny. He shared it with the dog. “Ya hear that, Giovanni? Our friend here wants to know why not.” To Jake he said, “Just isn’t how it’s done. Ponte, he’s old school. You want to talk to him, you set up a meet. Which isn’t easy. Has so many bodyguards, his bodyguards have bodyguards. You talk to this guy, that guy, maybe eventually you get to Ponte. And after all that, why should Ponte give a shit?”

  Jake said, “If he’s so old school, he probably wouldn’t approve of one of his guys running over an innocent woman with a boat. There’s rules, right?”

  “That’s a point,” Bert said. “There’s rules. If anybody follows ’em anymore.”

  Joey put his sandwich down and fastidiously wiped his fingers on a paper napkin. “Can we please back up a step? You don’t know for sure that the boyfriend did it. If he did do it, he’s not gonna appreciate you snooping around. And who’s Ponte gonna side with — a guy who’s been loyal to him or someone he doesn’t know from Adam?”

  Bert thoughtfully stroked the chihuahua in his lap. “That’s also a point.”

  Jake said, “I just want to find out if he did it.”

  Joey said, “Okay. Fine. Then what?”

  For that Jake had no answer. The simple truth was that he hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  “You see, this is exactly the problem,” Joey went on. “This is why this whole thing is a very bad idea. You can’t just find out. You find out and then you’re supposed to do something. And there’s no good choices for what you’d do. You make a stink with Ace, he breaks your legs. You go to the cops, Ponte has you whacked. These are not good options.”

  With a steadfastness that surprised himself, Jake said, “I’ll figure something out.”

  Off the beat, two-thirds of a moment later, Bert murmured, “Guy has balls. I didn’t think he did but he does.” He seemed to be saying it to the dog, to the fish on the walls, possibly to Joey, to everyone except Jake.

  Joey took one more shot at talking Jake out of it. “Something like this, you start it, at some point you can’t control it anymore.”

  Jake silently held his ground.

  Out of rhythm but firmly, Bert said, “You want me to, I’ll try setting up a meet. Might take a day or two. You mind driving to Miami?”

  23.

  “Knock, knock,” said Claire.

  She was standing in front of Candace’s tent, the Keys equivalent of the standard actor’s trailer. The flaps were zipped tightly shut. Nearby, bugs were buzzing, palm fronds were rattling, but no sound was coming from inside.

  After a moment, a voice asked who was there. It was Candace’s voice but it was different now. The fire and the hiss had gone out of it. It was a soft and unsure voice, girlish and pouty.

  Claire announced herself. The zipper came up with a rasp and Candace stepped aside to let her in. Then she quickly sealed the flap again and sat down on a cot, Claire sitting opposite. In the greenish filtered light inside the tent, she could see that the actress had been crying. In itself this was not a novelty. Candace summoned tears quite easily and often, both in her television role and in her tempestuous dealings with the world. Still, to Claire it was surprising and even touching to see that Candace might cry with no one watching, might cry just because she needed to.

  Reaching out across the narrow space between them, Claire stroked the other woman’s hand and said, “It’s all right. Everybody’s tired. Everyone was ready for a break.”

  Candace didn’t answer right away. Like a child she just narrowed her eyes, looked down, and shook her head. Finally she said, “No, I went too far this time. I said some pretty awful things. Everyone’ll hate me now.”

  The fact that no one had been too damn fond of Candace to begin with only made the remark more painful. Claire said, “It’ll blow over. These things always do.”

  “I’m just so stressed out.”

  “I know, I know. The accident, the interviews--”

  “It isn’t only that,” said Candace. Tightly gripping the edge of the cot with both hands, she’d pulled herself forward into an urgent posture. Her voice had become a confidential whisper, but a whisper that carried; a stage whisper. To Claire it seemed that, in a heartbeat, the actress had slammed shut the briefly opened window into her true emotions and was back to being a performer putting over a line. She paused a pregnant moment for effect, then said, “I think I’m being stalked.”

  Claire strained to keep her expression completely neutral but she remembered only too well the sick game-playing of a couple of evenings before, at the meeting with the suits. Now it seemed the diva was crying wolf again, creating yet more manipulative drama, probably meant to justify her tantrum.

  Claire’s skepticism must have shown, because Candace addressed it head-on. “Look, this has nothing to do with publicity or media or any of that nonsense. It just started yesterday. I look up and someone’s there. Three, four times it’s happened. Getting out of the limo. Leaving the hotel. Someone’s standing not too far away, just staring at me, a really creepy stare. No expression, never looks away. Just watches.”

  Trying to be comforting, Claire said, “You know how it is around a show. There’s always some fans who are a little weird, some harmless loser guys who have a crush on you.”

  “No, I know those types. I smile at them and they melt. This is different.”

  “Probably just a paparazzo then.”

  “No,” said Candace. “There’s no cameras. And it’s a woman.”

  “A woman?”

  “A blonde. Very tall, very stylish, very showy. Big sunglasses, sort of an orangey tint.”

  Suddenly a notch less skeptical, Claire said, “And sandals that lace up almost to her knees?”

  Surprised, hopeful, Candace said, “Yeah, that’s her. You know her?”

  “I’ve seen her by the pool.”

  “Our pool?”

  Claire nodded. “We said hello. I tried to be friendly. She’s an oddball, that’s all.”

  Candace was not persuaded. “It’s more than that. The way she looks at me, it scares me.”

  Claire found nothing to say.

  “The weirdest part,” the actress went on, “is that she sort of looks familiar. Just vaguely. I can’t place why. The hair? The posture? Something.”

  Claire admitted that she had had the same uneasy impression.

  “That creeps me out,” said Candace. “It really does.” Her lower lip was trembling slightly. It was impossible to tell if the quivering was caused by skill or fear, or if her imploring tone was produced by anxiety or training. “Please, Claire, do something for me. Please. I don’t know if I can stay here if you don’t. Find out who that woman is.”

  24.

  In his ocean-view apartment at the Paradiso Condominium, Bert d’Ambrosia still possessed a telephone that was actually wired to the wall and whose receiver was connected to the dialing part by a twisted, curling cord. The phone was of a piece with the other furnishings, giving his place the feel of a consignment shop featuring artifacts from half a century ago. A Danish modern sofa. Space-age lamps. A formica kitchen table with a pattern of turquoise and coral boomerangs. There were a few pictures on the walls — seascapes, moonlit palms — and some photos of his long-dead wife in leaning frames on the end tables.

  Bert now used his antique phone to try to reach some goombahs he used to know, hoping to recruit their help in setting up a meet with Charlie Ponte. He wasn’t quite sure why he was bothering to do this. Partly as a favor to Jake, of course. But beyond that? Maybe he was just giving himself something to do, to think about. Wanting to remember what it was like to be part of things, a player, connected to the world beyond his ancient furniture and misnamed dog.

  If that was the aim, the early results were dishe
artening. A few of the numbers he tried were either out of service or now belonged to people speaking languages he couldn’t understand. Of the former associates he did manage to reach, a couple expressed frank amazement that Bert was still alive. They claimed to be happy to hear from him but could or would do nothing for him. With Charlie Ponte, everything came down to favors granted and favors owed; why waste a favor on an old man who hadn’t mattered much for decades?

  In his own mind, Bert was becoming embarrassed. He’d told Jake and Joey he could do this. He’d believed it himself. What if he couldn’t get it done? How would he explain his failure? Sensing its master’s subtle agitation, the chihuahua grew antsy as well. It started running manic circuits around the living room, past the torch lamp, underneath the breakfront, stopping now and then to sniff at pee stains left eons before by its predecessor, seeming to contemplate the archaic vapors as if they held the key to some crucial and abiding mystery.

  Bert kept making calls.

  ---

  Paolo, the front desk clerk at The Nest, was a sunny young man with stiff blonde hair above coal-black eyebrows and hollow disks the size of dimes in both his earlobes. Over the preceding weeks and months he’d worked up a deliciously gossipy rapport with Claire Segal, since she was the babysitter who’d settle up the cast members’ bills if they flaked out, who’d pay for their breakage of glassware and pillaging of mini-bars, who’d apologize for their occasionally drunken or boorish behavior toward staff and other guests. He would have liked to answer her questions about the tall strange woman with the crazy sandals, but all he knew was that she’d checked out just an hour or so before.

  “You know her name?” Claire asked.

  Paolo looked discreetly around, past the potted ficuses and the vases filled with hibiscus blooms, and spoke softly. “I know the name she registered under. But it’s obviously fake. Sorda Randy.”