William Bishop had everything to do with this film. But despite what Harry Cherry said to me, Felicity McGrath’s name isn’t listed as a member of The Boatman’s cast. When Brenda realizes this, she lets out a disappointed groan.
What I feel is not disappointment but another emotion entirely. Because other words on this long-forgotten piece of paper cause a frenzied jolt of electricity to surge down my spine.
“Could we get out of this place now?” Brenda says.
I tuck the Hildy Gish file under my arm and go to the door. The moment I open it, a scream comes from down the hall, the hideous falsetto of a male in agony. I close the door to a crack and look out. The only parts of big Roland’s body that are visible are his arms and lower torso, enough to see that he’s sprawled out lifeless in his chair. Two men, one tall and one short, both middle-aged muscular, draw away from him and head toward the door, not running but walking with purpose, like masters of efficient slaughter. These guys are professionals. They’ve overpowered a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound roughneck before he could get out of his chair.
“Let’s go,” I say. “Now!”
“Oh my god, oh my god,” Brenda whimpers.
Still clutching the Gish file with one hand, I grab her wrist with the other and lead her back to the so-called office with the desk and the computer, no place to hide in itself, little more than an alcove. The file room door rattles. They’ve got Roland’s keys, and they’re trying them in the lock. After only a few tries, I hear the door swing open.
A thick industrial curtain covers the entire back wall, the kind that’s suspended from a track in the ceiling and that can slide to separate the office from the rest of the file room. I take hold of the hem, lift it up, and tell Brenda to crawl behind. She looks at me as if I’m daft. The footsteps on the concrete floor are getting louder. But maybe we’ve gotten a break—the men seem to be meticulously going up and down the file stacks looking for us. She has no choice, and once she’s gone behind the curtain, I follow her under. The stench of dust and mold and decaying insect parts and rodent droppings is nauseating, and I try to hold my breath. Brenda’s breathing is so loud and labored that she’s on the verge of hyperventilating. I fear that the men will hear her gasping for air and find us. She presses her body against mine, evidently thinking that we’re going to try to avoid those men by hiding behind the curtain, but I push her away—I’m not foolish enough to think we can win a game of hide ’n’ seek behind some filthy drapery.
In the darkness, I feel along the wall, hoping that my memory of a drunken night eight years ago is still clear enough to find what I’m looking for. And there it is—the handleless door in the drywall. I push hard, and it opens inward with a scraping sound. I hope those guys are far enough away that they didn’t hear it. I pull Brenda inside and shut the door tightly. There’s a lock, but only one of those cheap sliding latches that you get in the hardware store, the kind that wouldn’t survive one blow from those guys. I lock it anyway.
Though there’s a light switch, I’m not about to turn it on, so it’s black in here. I feel my way to the end of the short hall and find another door, but it’s locked. I’m not about to jangle my keys trying to unlock it. This far below ground, it’s dank and cold. Or maybe it’s just the fear that’s making me shiver. Brenda presses her body against mine. I put my arm around her and hold her tightly, not for any amorous reason—mortal terror is only sexually arousing in the movies—but so those guys won’t hear her teeth chatter. Harry Cherry claimed that underground rivers run through Beverly Hills, and with a straight face, Harmon would insist that it was true. I never believed them, but now I hear the babble and whoosh of rushing water. It’s probably just the plumbing, or the blood rushing through my veins at Mach speed.
I try to keep still, to keep Brenda still, to comprehend the footsteps and the murmured words of the stalkers on the other side. As so often happens when you try to focus on one thing for too long, my mind wanders, and I recall the night I learned about this door. My late partner Deanna Poulos and I had won a major trial that day and had celebrated by hitting more than a few Beverly Hills bars for a tequila taste test. After a night of doing shot after shot, we returned to the building at about midnight and got in the elevator to retrieve our cars, though neither of us should have even thought of driving. But instead of going to the parking level, she pressed the button for the archives.
“There’s something I want you to do for me—or rather to me,” she said. Although Deanna preferred to sleep with women, we’d have these occasional trysts that she called sport fucking—we fooled ourselves into believing we could dismiss the act’s significance by making light of it. She was one of those people who consciously aspired to be known as wild and edgy, and the alcohol fueled that goal. She took me to the archives, opened the curtains, and showed me this door, which she’d learned about from Philip Paulsen during a document production.
“I always wanted to fuck in a cave, and this room is like a cave,” she said with a drunken logic that made sense to me only because I was also drunk. So we went inside and had sex almost fully dressed and standing up. The next morning I arrived at work with a raging hangover and had to listen to an equally hungover Deanna berate me for agreeing to go along with something so unsexy and crass.
Now the footsteps get louder. The slaps of shoe leather on concrete are arrhythmic, which means that both of them are close. There’s a scraping and tapping, no longer coming from floor level but higher up, and I’m certain that one or both of them are feeling along the curtain to see if we’re hiding behind it. Fortunately, the door has no handle. Will they feel the door seams or lift the curtain high enough to notice the door? Brenda is holding her breath and trying not to shake. Her heavy perfume seems to have saturated whatever air is left in this place, and now I worry that Bishop’s men will smell it.
The sounds stop, and there’s grumbling, and the footsteps fade, and one of the men says what sounds like, “We’d better get out of here,” and eventually there’s the heavy thud of the front door shutting. I don’t think we’ve been hiding for more than ten minutes, but I’ve lost track of time, and I make sure we stay in that dark room for twice that long. Finally, I motion for Brenda to stay put, open the door gingerly, slide out, and lift up the curtain, my heart in a race with my panting lungs. I slowly creep out and look up and down the stacks, but I don’t see anyone. I doubt they’d lie in wait, which gives me comfort. I knock on the wall twice, and Brenda opens the door, pulling so hard that the scrape of wood against concrete reverberates throughout the file room. I take her hand, and we run for the door.
When we’re sure the corridor is clear, we hurry over to the desk, where Roland’s huge body has somehow slipped to the floor. I bend down next to him, and as I reach out to feel for a pulse, there’s a loud gurgle of breath that makes me flinch.
Roland opens his eyes, shakes his head, and says, “Holy shit, those guys were good. A Taser gun and some kind of sleeper hold . . . shit, my head’s spinning.” He makes a move to stand, and when I tell him to sit he shakes me off, so I help him up as best I can, no easy task given his girth. He goes over and sits behind his desk, and then asks me to give him his cap, which for some inexplicable reason he perches on his head. I pick up the phone and dial 911, asking for both the cops and an ambulance.
“They were looking for you, Parker,” Roland says. “When I told them I hadn’t seen you, they said they’d followed you here. I told them that you’d come and gone. Guess they didn’t believe me.”
Only when the paramedics arrive do I realize that I no longer have the Hildy Gish file, and I’m about to go back inside the archives to get it when I notice that Brenda is carrying it.
“You left it on the floor of that horrible, wonderful room,” she says. “I wasn’t going to let it out of our sight.”
Roland has no record of anyone from Bishop or Parapet Media coming to look at files, though there are always work people coming in and out of the place. After talkin
g to the police—they made clear that they didn’t take me seriously when I said William Bishop was behind the attack on Roland—I want Brenda to go home or back to The Barrista, but she refuses. “I’m part of this more than ever,” she says.
So we drive to Topanga College together. The young man at the information booth tells us that Nate Ettinger is teaching a seminar. We find the classroom and stand in the back of the room. Ettinger looks at us in surprise but doesn’t break cadence, continuing his lecture about legitimate uses of film and art as tools of political persuasion. He praises the aesthetics of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, he believes that Oliver Stone is a great thinker, he maintains that celebrities like Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger are prototypes for future politicians. By the time his lecture is over, I want to punch him. Actually, I’ve wanted to punch him since I saw The Boatman cast list.
After class, he speaks informally with some students and then comes over and greets us with a big smile, though he isn’t happy to see us. He sits across from us, pats the outside of his plaid sport coat, and takes a half-bent billiard pipe out of the inside pocket. Smoking is prohibited in college classrooms, but he lights up anyway. “To what do I owe this unexpected visit?” he says.
“I was overcome with the sudden urge to ask you what it’s like to work for William Bishop,” I say.
The smile remains on his lips but leaves his eyes. “I wouldn’t know. I never worked for him. He didn’t give me the opportunity. When he took over the studio I was working at, he killed my movie in its infancy.”
“Oh, you did work for him,” I say. “On The Boatman. I have the list of cast and crew. And it’s interesting—the typewritten credits sheet lists you as an associate producer, but someone crossed that out with a pen and listed you as the lighting and sound man. Which was it?”
He jerks his head back and drops the pipe, not bothering to pick it up.
“Let me see it,” he says.
I slide it over to him. He scowls at the piece of paper and slides the list back to me with aggression.
“Lighting and sound?” he says. “Sure, why not.”
“Why the lying?” I say.
His shoulders slump, and he sighs like a man accepting news of a serious illness. “Do you know that after the film was shut down, two of his goons showed up to search my apartment to make sure I didn’t have any copies? Frightened my girlfriend, tore up the place, and threatened to break my legs if they found out I had a copy. That’s why I lied to you and that’s why I won’t discuss that movie or McGrath or Bishop.”
“Who sent them?” I ask. “Bishop?”
He crosses his arms. “I won’t discuss it.”
“Did Felicity McGrath act in The Boatman?” I ask.
He just stares at me.
I blurt the next words out—a lawyer’s primal instinct. “Last time we were here, you said Felicity slept with many men in Hollywood. Did they include you?”
Ettinger raises his hand in denial, but there’s also a fleeting braggadocian glint in his eyes that answers my question in the affirmative.
Brenda goes to the other side of the table and sits beside him. “I know this is scary,” she says. “But we really need your help. Can you at least tell us whether Felicity acted in the movie?”
“I cannot,” he says.
“There’s another person we’re interested in,” I say. “The cast list says that an actor named Bradley Kelly was in The Boatman. Is that the same guy who started the Church of the Sanctified Assembly?”
Ettinger closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and nods. “Another reason why I won’t talk about it.”
Though I was certain that it was the same Kelly, Ettinger’s confirmation causes a glaucomatous fog to descend, one of the many symptoms of my courtroom stage fright. The late Bradley Kelly was the charismatic founder of the Sanctified Assembly, supposedly a divine prophet who traveled to a parallel universe and drank of the celestial fountain of all truth. He also seduced my mother and persuaded her to join his sham religion because she had business savvy that he didn’t. Through her, he got access to the money I earned as an actor. She dragged me into that world, and there I stayed until age fifteen, when I escaped the abuse and terror. After that, I became the Assembly’s sworn enemy. I’m still their enemy.
A young woman comes into the classroom and walks over to Ettinger. “I thought we had office hours, Professor. Did I get the time wrong?”
“No, Madison. You have the correct time. I unexpectedly got tied up. But I’m done with my meeting now. Let’s get some coffee and talk in the plaza.” He stands up and without saying good-bye escapes through the door.
“He isn’t only afraid of Bishop,” Brenda says. “He’s afraid of the cult.”
“He should be.”
She grabs my sleeve. “We’ll figure this out. I’ll find addresses or phone numbers for the people who worked on The Boatman. And we have Philip Paulsen, and he’s awesome.”
I nod. There’s something I haven’t told Brenda. It’s about another actor whose name appears on The Boatman cast list. His name appears on page 2, near the bottom:
Little Cupid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parky Gerald
Was I really in that movie as a four-year-old? Did I know Felicity McGrath?
As soon as Brenda and I leave the campus and get back into my car, we call Philip Paulsen on the speakerphone to update him on the day’s developments. He uncharacteristically loses his temper over Bishop’s Gestapo tactics. After we convince him that we’re OK, he says, “I’m down at the County Hall of Records. I’ve been looking at records the entire day.” His breathing is so labored that I’m certain he’s drenched in sweat from sitting in that stuffy old government building, where air-conditioning and adequate circulation are only aspirational. He would’ve been safer in the Macklin & Cherry archives.
“You’re working too hard,” I say. “Which is exactly what Joyce doesn’t want. What I don’t want.”
“I found something,” he says. “Felicity McGrath had a child.”
“Rumors were that she was pregnant,” I say. “We already knew that.”
“No. She bore the child two years before her disappearance.”
Brenda half squeals, half gasps. Because Philip delivered the news in his pastoral monotone, it takes me a moment to understand its significance. When it does, I swerve halfway into the other lane, earning a long, hostile honk from an affronted Audi. I pull over to the curb and cut the engine.
“Go ahead, Philip,” I say.
There’s the whoosh of his breathing on the other end of the line. “OK,” he says. “There’s a birth certificate for a baby girl named Alicia Courtney Turner, born December 21, 1985. Mother, Paula McGrath. Father, Samuel Turner. Unmarried.”
I shudder when I hear the middle name—the same as the cosplayer who believes she’s Felicity. I’d take it as another one of her make-believe games, except she couldn’t possibly know that Felicity had a daughter.
“The actor who played Rossiter in Meadows of Deceit?” I say. “Have we tried to find him?”
“We did and he’s dead,” Brenda says. “Died in 2005 of AIDS.”
“Why didn’t the media pick the birth up?” I say. “Or the cops?”
“The birth certificate was filed under seal,” Philip says.
“Whoa, that’s probably illegal,” I say.
“Someone had to have mucho clout to get it done,” Philip says. “Like our boy Bishop.”
“Bishop wasn’t that powerful in the mid-eighties,” I say. “I doubt he could—”
“Maybe his father?” Philip says.
It doesn’t seem likely that lawyer Howard Bishop had that kind of power. But it doesn’t seem likely that he could have quashed The Boatman, either, and Harry Cherry claims he did.
“How did you manage to get a copy?” I ask Philip.
“I have a connection,” he says. “That’s all you need to know. I’m going to do som
e looking for Alicia Turner.”
“Go home,” I say. “If not for yourself, for me. Joyce will kill me if you don’t take better care of yourself.”
“I’ll let you know what I find,” he says, and the connection goes dead.
“I’ll look on the Internet for this Alicia girl,” Brenda says once we’re back on the road. “She’s young, so maybe she’s on Facebook. Maybe she knows something about what happened to her mother.”
“If she even knows who her mother was,” I say.
Brighton slides the cursor across the screen and simultaneously presses the tilde key to cast a spell on a Komodo dragon that bears an uncanny resemblance to William Bishop. The giant lizard is wearing leather puttees and jodhpurs and is carrying an old-time movie director’s megaphone. Bugsy says he’s dressed like Cecil B. DeMille, whoever that is.
“Pause that thing,” Bugsy says.
Brighton hits the pause key.
“That damn game of yours,” Bugsy says in that perpetually stern voice that doesn’t necessarily reflect his true mood. “It resurrects the dead. Some things should be left alone.”
Brighton doesn’t understand Bugsy’s point, but he resumes playing the game, sensing that this will rile Bugsy up, which is perfectly OK because he’s learned that Bugsy likes nothing more than to be riled up. It gets him pontificating, the HF Queen says.
“In my day, there were sharp lines of demarcation between reality and illusion,” Bugsy says. “Novels and films were fantasy worlds where you went to escape reality, to laugh, to scream, to cry, to cogitate, to fantasize, all without consequence. Now what do you have? So-called ‘reality’ television, where you try to glorify your own existence by scoffing at someone else’s, never mind the observer effect, which means, because I’m sure you don’t know about quantum physics, that the very presence of the camera changes the reality so you’re not seeing reality at all. And then there’s your Abduction! game, supposedly pure illusion but seemingly affecting the world outside the screen in adverse ways. Although the logical theory is that this Poniard fellow is the murderer himself.”
Reckless Disregard Page 12
