I release her arm. “To what do I owe the pleasure, Harriet?”
“Your defective behavior continues to break my heart, Parky.” She tinkers with the bun in her brown hair, adjusting the rubber band and pulling her hair so tight that the skin on her forehead becomes even tauter, something that seems impossible given the cosmetic surgery she’s had.
Harriet Stern’s tryst with Bradley Kelly saved her from what seemed like an inevitable death from a drug overdose or suicide. Together, they found a loophole in the Coogan Act, the law that protects child actors from unscrupulous parents, and used my trust fund to finance Kelly’s new church. Through Kelly’s messianic charisma and my mother’s business acumen, they built one of the fastest-growing religions in the world. I call it a cult. They separate adherents from their non-believing families, extort money from devotees in the guise of tithing, seek to infiltrate governments and powerful corporations, and believe that disease results from spiritual impurity. When they started, their so-called rituals were illegal and perverse. They returned my money only after I escaped their clutches at age fifteen, became an emancipated minor, and threatened to expose secrets that would have put them and other Assembly founders behind bars for the rest of their lives. Since then, Quiana Gottschalk has become a recluse, a goddess, someone whose very existence the Assembly denies to the outside world.
“I hold you responsible for the gutter blasphemy that’s all over the Internet,” she says. “Put a stop to it.”
“I’m not in the mood for this, Harriet. I just came from the funeral of a dear man who was murdered on my watch.”
No condolences. Assembly devotees don’t offer condolences to the family and friends of a nonbeliever. “This Poniard creature shouldn’t be your client,” she says. “As long as he is, you’ll be held responsible for anything he says about us.”
“You had your soldiers bring me here just to tell me that?”
“I want you to know how serious this is. I’m only one person. My influence extends only so far. You’re not popular with the Assembly.”
We stare at each other for a long time. Finally, I say, “Tell me about The Boatman, Harriet.”
Her eyes widen, and behind the surprise I see the complexity that is, and has always been, my mother. She’s calculating whether to lie, and that already tells me a lot.
“You’re as resourceful as ever, Parker.”
“The Boatman, Harriet. I was in it, remember?”
“You were only in one scene.” She takes a slow, relenting breath. “It was a play on that Greek myth . . .”
“Orpheus?”
“Yeah, a modern version, supposedly. Except, it had already been done by Marcel Camus, Tennessee Williams, Sidney Lumet. Billy Bishop’s father wasn’t happy, and he was the main investor. At some point, production shut down, and then Howard Bishop’s people came in to destroy all the dailies, the rough cuts. They were worried about videotapes, new technology. They visited everyone personally and made certain no one had a copy.”
“Howard Bishop was a lawyer. How did he have the power to—?”
“He was a man with dangerous friends.”
Of course. The music industry and the mob were still closely connected in the late seventies. Howard Bishop must have called in a favor. Still, why would Nate Ettinger be frightened after all these years?
“My sources tell me that Felicity McGrath was one of the actresses,” I say.
Harriet arches her indelible eyebrows. “That annoying McGrath girl did not act in The Boatman.”
At first I think that Harry Cherry’s revelation was the product of a senescent mind, but then I realize that Harry never said that Felicity acted in The Boatman. He only said that she was on the picture.
“If she didn’t act, what did she do?” I ask.
“She was supposedly the writer and director.”
“At twenty years old?”
“She was a manipulative, coquettish dilettante, a little girl pretending to be an artiste.”
So now I know one truth about Felicity McGrath—she was a prodigy, the creative force behind whatever The Boatman was. My mother gave it away by singing the word “artiste” in a sharp falsetto that was meant to convey sarcasm but that instead revealed envy. Harriet always wanted to be an artist and a great man’s love, and no matter how grand her position in the Sanctified Assembly hierarchy, she’s neither.
“Any reason to believe that Felicity disappeared because of her work on that movie?” I ask.
“How would I know?”
“There’s a world of secrets you know that you don’t reveal. How about sharing this one? Is William Bishop an Assembly Devotee? He drove a blue Mercedes in 1987.”
The sentries have for a while blended into the statuary, but when I ask this question, the guy on my left takes a halting step forward before righting himself and clasping his hands in front of him. Nothing is more top secret than the Assembly’s membership roll.
She shakes a finger at me as if I were eight.
“Then tell me about Nate Ettinger,” I say.
“Who?”
“He’s now a film professor, but he worked on The Boatman as a grip. You apparently knew him quite well.”
“I wouldn’t have had anything to do with a grip.”
“He was very handsome back then. And it wasn’t on The Boatman where you and he . . . became close. It was on Climbing Panda Hill.”
She smiles a wistful smile in recollection. “Oh, you mean Nathan. He was never a grip. He knew how to make movies. I thought he was destined to make it big, so I . . .” She crosses her arms and prunes her lips indignantly, exactly as she did in the old days when she was concealing something. “This is my personal business.”
“Can you at least tell me what Ettinger did on The Boatman? I’m not sure whether he was an associate producer or just a grip.”
“It depended on who you asked, Bishop or that girl. Bishop didn’t like him. I think he was jealous.”
“Bishop was jealous of Ettinger, or Ettinger was jealous of Bishop?”
She shrugs, but for Harriet Stern that means not that she’s uncertain of the answer but that it’s time to move on to another topic.
“Did you meet Kelly on The Boatman?”
“That movie inspired Bradley to . . .” She looks at the sentries and catches herself. So, she has secrets from them, too.
“That movie inspired Kelly to do what?”
“I’m not going to discuss Bradley with you, may his divine memory shine in the celestial firmament.”
I roll my eyes Parky Gerald style. “I wish you’d never met that man.”
“He saved my life.”
“And tried to destroy mine.”
She lowers her eyes, a gesture that’s the closest she’s ever come to showing remorse for exposing me to the predatory Kelly.
“Who else was on the movie?” I ask.
She shrugs, whether in ignorance or refusal I’m not certain.
“One last question,” I say. “Did I have contact with Felicity McGrath?”
She lifts her eyes to the ceiling and then lowers them to check her Lady Rolex. My mother always had a short attention span, and now I’m boring her.
“Please, Harriet.”
She sighs melodramatically. “You were an adorable, talented child, and she directed every scene, or tried to. So yes, you worked with her.”
“Am I free to go?” I ask.
“You’ve always been free to go. You only came because you chose to.”
“Did you tell that to your private militia?”
I turn to leave, but she grasps my arm. Her eyes are suddenly hooded with fatigue. “Make your client leave us alone, Parky.”
Poniard has disabled Abduction! When Brighton logs on, all he sees is a slideshow—images of Philip Paulsen, the poor old man who got stabbed while working for Poniard’s lawyer Stern. When Bugsy first saw the graphics he whistled through his teeth and said, “This guy’s a fucking video game Rembra
ndt.” In one picture, Paulsen is carrying a square brief case; he has a golden halo and angel’s wings. In another, he’s dressed like a Catholic priest. In a third, he is an angel hovering over the ruins of a sci-fi-looking city. The slideshow is accompanied by sad organ music, which Bugsy calls a dirge.
Brighton once overheard Bugsy tell the Queen that “Dumping Stern was the biggest fucking mistake of your life,” to which she replied, “Father, keep your voice down and if you ever say that again I’ll move out and take Brighton with me. Anyway,” she continued, “Parker is probably fucking his assistant.” To which Bugsy said, “Keep your voice down and what else did you expect after the way you’ve treated him?”
The Queen keeps calling Stern a fool, keeps saying that Poniard knew about the Kreiss killings before they happened. The Queen says that Poniard is insane. But why would even a crazy Poniard murder his supporters? In a video game, you don’t kill your helpers because, whether you’re crazy or not, it makes the game boring. And video games can be hacked. The funny thing is that the Queen was on her cell phone one evening telling her boss exactly that. Playing “devil’s advocate,” she called it.
Then one night, Brighton is sitting in front of the computer screen, mesmerized by the rhythmic patterns that the Paulsen images make. He’s watched them so many times that he now recognizes that Poniard calibrated the brightness of the images to change in time to the music, so that if you watch the show in the dark, the light seems to dance a dark ballet off the walls. At one point, he mindlessly jiggles the mouse. The image of Paulsen dissolves, the screen turns to black, and there’s a new level—Stage Five: Vengeance.
After leaving the Assembly’s Grand Temple, I head for The Barrista, hoping to fill Brenda in on the news about Felicity and The Boatman, but she’s not there. She doesn’t answer her cell phone, doesn’t respond to texts or e-mails. I’d go to her home, but I don’t know where she lives. I call the head of human resources at JADS to see if I can get an address or convince her to contact Brenda herself, but she hangs up on me.
Meanwhile, I get an e-mail message from my document examiner that the Felicity letters to Scotty are authentic. Better yet, Lovely’s expert doesn’t dispute their authenticity, almost unheard of in litigation. I e-mail Poniard the news and get back an of course what else did you expect? and an abrupt sign-off.
The next morning, just before nine o’clock—my self-imposed deadline for alerting the cops and calling the local hospitals—Brenda walks into the coffee shop. I don’t recognize her right away, because she’s wearing a gray zippered sweatshirt, pink T-shirt, tattered blue jeans, and cross-trainers. No makeup, her hair unkempt in a half ponytail. Today, the dark rings around her eyes are from fatigue, not over-applied eyeliner.
“I missed you at the funeral,” I say.
One of the baristas brings her a black coffee, unusual, because Brenda normally drinks only bottled water and a cup of tea in the afternoon. “I tried, I really did, but I can’t handle funerals. Especially his. So I was working.”
“I wasn’t scolding you. I was worried.”
Her eyes are filmy from grief and lack of sleep. “I’m sorry I came to work dressed this way. I look awful. It’s unprofessional.”
“It’s a coffee house, Brenda, not a courthouse.”
“Philip was going to take me Christmas shopping. He told me he needed help picking out a present for Joyce.”
Christmas is two weeks away. I’ve noticed, of course, but I haven’t paid attention. Before my mother became entangled with Bradley Kelly and the Church of the Sanctified Assembly, her views on God’s existence and form reflected those of the man she was sleeping with. Whatever her creed of the month, she wasn’t big on celebrating the holidays. I was never sure of my ethnic background, because my mother lied about hers and I never knew who my father was. I still don’t. Each year, she bought me an expensive Christmas present. Of course, she used my money to do it. And while the Sanctified Assembly purports to respect Christmas and Christianity, it redefines the story of Christ’s birth to fit into Bradley Kelly’s discovery of the celestial fount. Since the day I escaped the cult, the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s have meant loneliness interspersed with alcohol-laden parties. I did enjoy the way tough-girl Lovely Diamond celebrated Hanukkah—how she knew the candle-lighting prayers by heart in Hebrew and English; how she made greasy, overdone potato latkes topped with dollops of sour cream or apple sauce; how she insisted we dance the hora to the Oh Hanukkah cassette her mother had bought her during first grade. That holiday came early this year, and the eighth day has come and gone. Did Lovely do anything differently because her boy is with her?
I tell Brenda about our document expert’s favorable opinion. Like me, she finds little joy in it. “I’ve spent the day working on the Boatman cast list,” she says, and starts to tell me what she’s found, but I motion for her to follow me into the back room where it’s private. She sits down in her chair, and I perch myself on the edge of her desk.
“There’s someone who isn’t listed on that document that should be,” I say. “Felicity McGrath. She wrote and directed the movie.”
I’ve jolted her into wakefulness more quickly than any cup of coffee could. “Did Ettinger tell you this?”
“A confidential source. Someone who’d go to the grave before testifying.”
Her shoulders slump, and I know she wants to probe further, but to her credit, she doesn’t.
“The cast list,” she says. She gives a rundown on the present whereabouts of The Boatman’s cast and crew. There weren’t many involved, not surprising for a low-budget film that never made it into post-production. William Bishop, Bradley Kelly, and Nate Ettinger are accounted for. Six others have dropped out of sight, including Hildy Gish and child actor Parky Gerald. Four others are dead, three of confirmed natural causes, one in a boating accident.
“But I’ve found something else,” she says. “It’s probably stupid, but . . .” She shrugs, embarrassed.
“Tell me.”
“A movie curse,” she says. “You know, like Rebel Without a Cause where James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo all died violent deaths? So did the young stars of Poltergeist. Actors who’ve played Superman have had terrible luck. The same with Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, on and on.” She twists her coffee cup back on forth on the desk.
“You don’t truly believe The Boatman was cursed, do you?” Once upon a time, I would’ve believed it. When I was a child my mother repeated every one of these curses, scaring me to death—I acted in movies, after all, and what if my movie were cursed and I’d be the next to die?
“Who knows what’s true?” she says. “But that’s not the point. Sit down and look.” I pull up a chair next to hers. In only a matter of minutes she shows me what she found—the “Orpheus & The Wise Guy” curse, one website calls it. Its subject is a mysterious, classic film that never saw the light of day because it angered an organized crime leader who proceeded to kill everyone who worked on the movie. The film was high art despite the unbridled depiction of hardcore sex and illegal drugs, a precursor to the films of Lars Von Trier and other edgy filmmakers who blur the lines between fantasy and reality. There’s no information about cast, crew, or plot, much less an association with Bishop or McGrath. The story is a wisp of legend scudding along on a vast cinematic ocean.
“What made you think of this?” I ask.
“Lucky, I guess. I was looking up movies and the mafia and Orpheus, and it just . . .”
“But even if this is The Boatman, how does it help?”
“The Mafia angle, maybe?”
“I wouldn’t have any idea how to contact anyone who . . .” That’s not true. There is someone I can talk to—if he doesn’t kill me before he hears what I want him to do.
“Let me get this crystal clear in my mind,” Ed Diamond says in his clipped, educated Brooklyn accent. “You want me to pump some racketeers for information, the knowledge of which could not only endanger my life but
would help you in your lawsuit against my own daughter?”
“That’s about right,” I say.
He brushes back his thinning gray hair, and somehow the gesture signals reproach. He’s dressed in his familiar polo shirt, corduroy slacks, and biker’s leather jacket, still playing the movie director, though as far as I know, he’s retired from making porn. But he’s cut the ponytail that he’s worn for decades. Is this because his grandchild now lives in his house?
“You have quite the large balls, Parky.”
“Please don’t call me that.” I glance around the room. The Barrista isn’t crowded, and the closest customers are three tables away. It’s one of the few times I’m happy about the sparse patronage. “I’m trying to get to the truth. I wouldn’t have called you if someone else could help me.”
As someone who started producing porn in the 1960s, Ed Diamond necessarily had underworld connections, couldn’t have plied his trade safely without them. He used his shady contacts to provide important information to me once before. But that was when Lovely and I were on the same side.
“Why would I help you at Lovely’s expense?” he asks.
“Because she recently told me that you like me.”
He takes an aggressive drink of coffee and presses his lips together as if he’s tasted something bitter, and it’s not the coffee. “I’m supposed to hide this information from her?”
“I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the risk to her and your grandson is too great.”
“A low blow to mention the kid. Such manipulation is beneath you.”
“It’s not manipulation. I’ve talked to people who still fear for their lives after thirty-five years.”
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll look into it. And here’s why. William Bishop was one of the bluenose pricks who kept me from getting a job directing mainstream movies. If he’s dirty, I want the public to know it.” His voice has gotten so loud that I raise a finger to my lips to shush him, which only annoys him more. “If Lovely’s backed the wrong horse, so be it. And I do worry about her. And Brighton.” He pauses. “I worry about you, too.”
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