“Yes.”
“Now what happens?”
“I think you’d better tell the police about it, Floyd.”
“Why?”
“I suppose for the same reason you told me.”
He thought about it. After a long time he nodded. “All right,” he said. “I can accept that. I’d never kill anybody again. I know that. But—you’re right, I have to tell them.”
“I’ll go with you if you want.”
“Yeah. I want you to.”
“I’ll have a drink and then we’ll go. You want another?”
“No. I’m not much of a drinker.”
I had it without the coffee this time. After Trina brought it, I asked him how he’d picked his victim. Why the bag lady?
He started to cry. No sobs, just tears spilling from his deep-set eyes. After a while he wiped them on his sleeve.
“Because she didn’t count,” he said. “That’s what I thought. She was nobody. Who cared if she died? Who’d miss her?” He closed his eyes tight. “Everybody misses her,” he said. “Everybody.”
SO I TOOK him in. I don’t know what they’ll do with him. It’s not my problem.
It wasn’t really a case, and I didn’t really solve it. As far as I can see, I didn’t do anything. It was the talk that drove Floyd Karp from cover, and no doubt I helped some of the talk get started, but much of it would have gotten around without me. All those legacies of Mary Alice Redfield’s had made her a nine-day wonder in the neighborhood. They ran to no form known to anyone but the bag lady herself, and they had in no way led to her death, but maybe they led to its resolution, since it was one of the legacies that got me involved.
So maybe she caught her own killer. Or maybe he caught himself, as everyone does. Maybe no man’s an island, and maybe everybody is.
All I know is I lit a candle for the woman, and I suspect I’m not the only one who did.
WILLIAM BANKIER
MAKING A KILLING WITH MAMA CASS
January 30, 1980
CANADIAN SHORT STORY specialist William Bankier frequently draws on his interest in music for his stories—as he does here. “Making a Killing with Mama Cass” is an excellent example of Bankier’s ability to work numerous characters and plot twists into the limited space of a short story, without sacrificing clarity or characterization. The story is a gem of compression, suggestion, and irony.
“Why weren’t you at the airport?” Gary Prime said to his wife, Anitra, as she let herself into the apartment. “The car would have made sense. Instead I was stuck with an eight-dollar taxi.” This was about as much anger as Gary ever expressed.
“I got your wire, but Lee had important clients in the screening room. I had to be there.” Anitra glanced at herself in a mirror, wondering if her adventure had made any visible difference. Gary back a day early was all she needed. She could have used more time to compose herself, to decide where they were all going from here—herself and Gary and Lee Cosford.
“Busy while I was away?” Gary asked.
“As usual. How was London?”
“I enjoyed it.” This was not the whole truth. Gary was a good mixer—his job demanded it. As a salesman for a Montreal engraving house, calling on the production departments of ad agencies, he got on well with the men who could discuss the advantages of offset reproduction versus letterpress. But throw him in with the clever boys from the creative department and it wasn’t the same.
He was grateful for his free trip to England, even though he knew he’d been asked only because somebody dropped out at the last minute. His engravings were the backbone of the prize-winning campaign, therefore some Samaritan had suggested filling the vacant seat with good old Gary. He had asked Anitra to come along but she refused, pleading too much going on at Lee Cosford Productions.
“I enjoyed London,” Gary repeated, “except for some of the brilliant conversation. My idea of hell is to be locked up for twenty-four hours with two copywriters, an art director, and an unlimited supply of booze. The drunker they get, the more they laugh. Only I can’t see the joke half the time.” Gary suspected that sometimes they derived their amusement from him. Not that he was a clod: his suit cost two hundred dollars, his shoes were shined, and he kept his hair trimmed. Maybe it was the haircut. The creative types either let their heads go altogether or had it styled and sprayed so they looked like Glen Campbell.
“Pay no attention to them,” Anitra said. She was pouring herself some coffee from the pot Gary had made when he came in. She looked good against the counter in slim denims made stylish by a gold belt. “Agency guys are all the same. They think they’re some kind of elite.”
“Elite. That’s the word. Everything is a put-down. You don’t dare tell them you enjoyed a movie—they’ll say it was commercial and leave you feeling stupid. To hear them, the girls going by are all dogs or hustlers, the food in the restaurant contains the ‘permissible level’ of rodent hairs, and the wine is sulphuric acid.”
“Kill-joys.”
“That’s the word for them. Kill-joys. If you have a sincere feeling, you have to hide it or they’ll make it into a joke.”
“So you had a lousy time. At least it was free.” Anitra studied her husband. Something was on his mind. He could never conceal enthusiasm—it shone from the large square face, the jaw set firm, the thick black hair neatly combed and gleaming with Vitalis.
“It was only two days, and apart from the meals, I was usually on my own.” He was getting ready to tell her. “But there was a thing happened—I’m excited about it. It’s as if …”
When Gary finished talking, Anitra could not understand what he was so worked up about. He had been watching late-night television in his hotel room and had turned on a talk show. The guest was the English actress Donna Dean, the sex symbol from the sixties, who was still pretty today but hugely overweight.
Anitra said, “And your idea is what? You want to ask her to be in a film about Mama Cass?”
“Not me. I can’t ask her. A film producer has to ask her. But she’d be perfect—if you saw her you’d know what I mean. She’s blonde, of course, so she’d need a dark wig. But she has the same baby face as Mama Cass and that majestic build. She was even wearing one of those big tent dresses Cass used to wear—”
Anitra found it difficult to become interested. Years ago, she had enjoyed listening to The Mamas and The Papas, and she had agreed with Gary in those days that the bell-like voice of Cass Elliott had a lot to do with the group’s success. More recently, she had heard something about the young woman’s untimely death, but nothing much about it had registered. “OK, there could be a film in it,” Anitra said. “What’s it got to do with you?”
“I’m the one to make it happen. I’ve got to do it.”
After watching the Donna Dean interview, Gary had left the hotel and gone for a walk along Bayswater Avenue. It was midnight. Hyde Park was on his right, substantial white Edwardian buildings on his left. Ahead loomed Marble Arch and Park Lane with its lineup of hotels far posher than the one he was inhabiting. Noisy little cars, square black taxis, and an occasional red double-decker bus kept up a continuous roar beside him, but Gary hardly heard the traffic.
His mind was filled with music from the cassettes he used to play till they nearly fell apart, the songs of dreams and of young girls coming to the canyon.
According to the newspapers, Cass Elliott had died in a hotel somewhere near there. They said she choked to death on a sandwich alone in her room.
“I have to get the film going,” Gary told his wife. “And now. Something tells me it’s important.”
“If you say so.”
“Your boss said once that a feature film will never happen unless somebody puts all his energy behind it. There are too many other ideas competing for the funds and the facilities.”
“Lee should know.”
“Right. So I thought you might lay it on him tomorrow.”
“Me? It’s your idea.” The last two days at
Lee’s place had given Anitra a shaking up. Some change in the relationship had been coming for a long time. But now she felt uncertain about her future, and the sensation was distasteful to her. From the time eight years ago when she organized her marriage to Gary, Anitra had kept uncertainties to a minimum. The false pregnancy was a cheat, but it got her out of a dismal situation at home. And it had done Gary no harm; he was forever testifying that the unexpected marriage had stabilized his life.
Now, for the sake of some excitement, she had gone with Lee Cosford. The event was satisfying enough as it was happening, but when they parted, there had been a distant look in Lee’s pale eyes and Anitra was no fool.
“You’d better describe the idea to Lee yourself,” she said. “I wouldn’t do it justice.” It would kill her to approach him with this loony request, as if she thought he owed her something.
“Just mention it. Set it up for me.”
“You’re a big boy, Gary. You know his number. Call him and tell him you’ve got a business proposition. Lee Cosford would rather talk business than anything.”
LEE COSFORD, rotund and dynamic, rolled out into the waiting room and took Gary by the arm. “Stranger,” he said, laughing, eyeing Prime anxiously, “where’ve you been keeping yourself? Come in and sit down. Stephie, make us a couple of coffees, will you?”
The idea sounded even better to Gary as he described it in Lee Cosford’s panelled office, taking pulls at a huge mug of coffee, squinting against sunlight streaming through the window past the spire of a church on lower Mountain Street. Cosford lay back in his leather recliner, boots on the glass desk, eyes closed like a man in a barber chair. As Gary finished, the bells in the tower across the street began to peal. He thought it was a good omen.
Cosford opened one eye. “Is that it?”
“That’s it, Lee.”
The film producer sat up. “I think it’s a sensational idea.”
“Really?”
“Fabulous. And you’ve probably heard Anitra mention I want to get into feature films. You can’t know how soul-destroying it is producing thirty-second pieces of film to sell detergent or sausages. Or maybe you do know. You have the same assignment in print.”
“I know what you mean.” Actually, Gary was proud of the engravings his firm produced.
“The trouble is,” Cosford said, “there are too many good film ideas chasing too little money. You just can’t get the financing.”
“I thought there was this Canadian Film Development Council. Don’t they put up money?”
“That’s right.” Cosford put his knees under the desk and folded his arms precisely on the cold glass. This square individual in the over-pressed suit had managed to brief himself. “The CFDC will, on occasion, back a good idea.”
“And this is more than a good idea, Lee. It’s a great idea.”
“Right.” Cosford’s mind was working fast. He was more than ready to see the last of Gary Prime. “But there’s only one way to approach the council. They have to see a treatment.”
“Treatment?”
“Right.” Cosford picked up his telephone, consulted a page of names and numbers, and began to dial. “A scenario—an outline of what the film is going to be about.”
“Can’t we just put the idea down in a letter?”
“No, it has to be professionally done. And I’ve got just the man to do it.” Cosford straightened up and smiled into the phone. “Hello, Lucas? Did I wake you? Lee Cosford. Fine, how are you? Luke, facing me across my desk is a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed fellow named Gary Prime, who happens to have a sensational idea for a feature film. The idea is so good, the only person to do the treatment is Lucas Pennington.”
After Gary Prime went away with an appointment to see Pennington at his apartment that afternoon, Lee Cosford wandered through a maze of corridors till he came to a small room where his film editor was seated at a Steenbeck machine with Anitra Prime at his shoulder. They were peering into the frosted glass screen at the image of a child holding a doll. The editor spun the film backward, then forward again so that the child kissed the doll while Anitra clicked her stopwatch.
“I just had your husband in. Thanks for not warning me.”
“I would have guessed next week. He’s quick off the mark all of a sudden.”
“Never mind. I got rid of him.”
“He’s sincere about the idea.
“I have twenty-five sincere ideas for feature films. Nine of them are my own.” Cosford opened a window and spat out into a laneway three floors below. He watched the spittle float down to disappear on gray pavement. “I sent him to Lucas Pennington to get a treatment done.”
The bald-headed man at the editing machine laughed.
“Who’s Lucas Pennington?” Anitra asked.
“Before your era. Once a good copywriter, now a professional drunk. He’s a freelance with loads of free time. Which is another way of saying the agencies are tired of Pennington missing deadlines.”
Anitra said, “It sounds like a dirty trick, Lee.” She frowned at her stopwatch; she was having no end of trouble making the product shot time out properly.
“It’s dirty but effective. It gets Gary off my back while he and poor old Luke use up a year pretending they’re writing a movie.”
IT WAS HALF past two when Gary showed up at Lucas Pennington’s place on Bleury Street. The apartment was located up a flight of uncarpeted stairs above a tavern and a shop that sold sneezing powder and rubber excrement. When he heard the knock, Pennington put the gin bottle and his glass out of sight—not because he was an inhospitable man, but because there was barely enough for himself. He left magazines, newspapers, open books, soiled clothing, empty food tins, and soft-drink bottles where they were and went to the door.
With his guest inside and seated, Pennington performed a humanitarian act; he opened a window.
Gary looked at the man who was supposed to write his Mama Cass treatment. To recommend this one, Lee Cosford had to be crazy. Pennington managed to be gaunt and sloppy at the same time. He seemed somewhere in his fifties—large head, patchy gray hair on a scalp that was scabby in places, apologetic eyes, and a smile that was choreographed to cover bad teeth. He had shaved a couple of days ago and had cut himself doing it.
“OK. All right now. Right.” He was rummaging around the room, not looking at Gary, sounding like a nervous infielder at the start of his final season. “Tell me about this picture of yours.”
As Gary described his visit to London, his television glimpse of Donna Dean, and the flash of inspiration that led him to cast her in the role of his favorite singer, Pennington, who had discovered a notebook and a pen, lay on the floor with his head and shoulders against the baseboard, his eyes closed.
“So if Dean would agree to do it, and if we could get the right to use the original recordings for her to mime, the way the singers all do on TV these days,” Gary concluded, “I think we could have a good film.”
Pennington rolled sideways onto his elbow, cupping his cheek in one hand. He bit the cover off the felt-tipped pen he was holding, spat it away, and began flipping the pages of the notebook to find a clean one. They were all filled with indecipherable scrawl. At last he settled for half of the inside back cover. “Brilliant. Solid gold,” he said as he tried to make marks with the pen. “Put me in, coach. Let me work on this one.”
“You mean it?”
The writer turned his eyes up to Gary and they looked different—they looked angry and hungry, the apologetic wetness all gone. Pennington was feeling an old, almost-forgotten sensation, the one he used to experience in his first agency job when the new assignments came in and he couldn’t wait to dazzle the copy chief and the account supervisor and the client with another brilliant idea. Quite often he would deliver a winner. Then it was cover the table with beer and how about a little more money for young Luke before Y&R lures him away with shares.
“I mean it all right,” Pennington said. “You’re onto a sure thing, my son. Mam
a Cass—that voice, the way she used to raise her hand and give that little half-salute as the song began to swing … I want to weep.” The pen refused to write, and after tearing holes in the cover, he threw pen and notebook against the wall, struggling to his feet like a crippled, pregnant camel.
“The tragedy of her death.” Pennington was pulling magazines and files from a buried tabletop, uncovering a typewriter. He used an ankle to drag a wooden chair into place, sat down, and cranked a crumpled letter around the roller, using two fingers to begin typing on the back of the paper. “What a career she had. Cass Elliott—there has to be a movie about her. And I know what you mean about the English broad to play the role. She’s almost Cass’s double. And she’ll do a hell of a good job—never mind the silly parts they gave her in the sixties. She’s a pro, a trained actress.”
Pennington’s typing was erratic. The keys kept sticking together in bunches, and he cursed as he clawed them away from the paper. He squinted at what he had done. “This ribbon is dead. It’s a ghost. Can you read that?”
Gary leaned over his shoulder, holding his breath. “Just barely.”
“Never mind, it’s coming, old son, the words are coming and I’ll hammer the bastards down. Cosford knows my situation. He’ll make a dark photostat of this and enlarge it three times.” Pennington managed to hit several keys without an overlap and he laughed out loud. “The old rhythm,” he said. “Once you’ve got it, you never lose it.”
“Can I do anything to help?” Gary asked, delighted with this crazy old writer’s reaction to his idea.
“Yes. Get out of here and let me work.”
TWO DAYS LATER, Lucas Pennington showed up in the reception room of Lee Cosford Productions. The girl behind the board blinked at the sight of the very tall man in his dusty suit. It was a three-piece blue serge—not this year’s model, not this decade’s. At the top of it, above the frayed gray collar and badly knotted tie, was a wet, crimson face looking as if the man had just shaved it with a broken bottle. At the bottom, stepping forward awkwardly across the deep-pile carpet, were astonishing leather thong sandals over patterned socks.
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