by John Gaspard
“Was he aware of that plan?”
“Who knows? I never really knew what was going on with him. Which I guess was our biggest problem—he had too many secrets and I didn’t have any.” She stared up at the ceiling for a long moment, then looked at me. I held her gaze.
“Why can’t life ever be simple?” she finally said.
“Well, according to my Uncle Harry, life is only simple for simple people.”
“You uncle sounds like a delightful man.”
“Trish, you have no idea.”
Chapter 15
“Is there something wrong with your cell phone?”
I could tell Harry was surprised to hear my voice coming from the top of the stairs. He was just opening the door to his apartment and he looked up the staircase, squinting at me. I was sitting in the dark.
“Hello there, Buster. Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“We’re not talking about me right now. We’re talking about you. And your cell phone. Did you perhaps lose it?”
He patted his pockets, finally pulling the phone out of his breast pocket. “It’s right here. Do you need it?” He held it up toward me.
“Is it on?”
“Is it on what?”
“Is it turned on?” I hissed as I stood and slowly moved down the stairs toward him.
“Of course not. I don’t want to wear out the battery.” He slipped the phone back into his pocket and opened his door, stepping deftly into his apartment and out of sight. I sped up and made it into his kitchen before the door swung shut.
“Do you know how worried I’ve been about you? I’ve been to the bar next door, I called Max, I called Sam, I even called Abe. Nobody knew where you were.”
“You should have called me,” he said as he took off his windbreaker and opened the closet door.
“I did call you. Your phone was turned off!”
“Oh, that’s right. Do you want some fruit? These bananas are right on the edge.”
“So am I, but don’t change the subject, old man. You left me a message this afternoon to call you.”
“I did? Oh, that’s right, I did. I needed a ride to the drug store. You didn’t call back, so I went out to catch the bus.”
“You’ve been at the drug store for the last eight hours?”
“Don’t be silly. What could one do in a drug store for eight hours?”
There was something woozy about his attitude it took me a moment to recognize. “Have you been drinking?”
He shook his head and then nodded, holding up his right hand and demonstrating with his thumb and first finger the international sign for “just a wee bit.”
I sat heavily in one of the three chairs that surrounded his small kitchen table and rubbed my eyes. When I opened them I saw he was now seated across from me. He was eating a banana. Another banana rested, unopened, in front of me on the table.
“Really, Buster, you should eat one. They’re right on the edge.”
“In the name of all that is holy, what is it going to take for you to tell me where you’ve been for the last eight hours while I’ve been sitting here going out of my mind?”
He arched an eyebrow at me. “Out of your mind?”
I shrugged. “Well, really, really concerned.”
He smiled. “Thank you,” he said. He took the last bite from his banana and then got up to throw the peel into the small trashcan under the sink. “Well, if you must know, I spent the evening in the company of two charming women.”
“Two women?” He had my attention and he knew it.
“Two charming women,” he said, stretching the word charming into about sixteen syllables.
I sat back in my chair. “Really. Do tell.”
“I needed to go to the drug store to refill my prescription. I tried calling you and when you didn’t answer your phone—I wonder from where you inherited that annoying trait?—I decided instead to take the bus. Minneapolis has, as you know, an extensive public transportation system,” he said with a twinkle in his eyes that made me want to strike him. “I suspect by the time the light rail finally gets built in this neighborhood I’ll be twenty years dead, but that’s all well and good because the busses run on time and they run right past our shop.”
“You’re going to make me regret asking, aren’t you? Can we cut to the chase?”
“So there I was, sitting on the bus bench, wondering about this and that, when a car pulled up, the passenger window was rolled down, and two attractive women asked me if I needed a ride somewhere.”
“You got into a car with two strange women?”
“It’s not like they offered me candy. And they weren’t strange women. It was your friend the psychic, Megan, and her other psychic friend, Franny. Hardly the kidnapping type, I think.”
“Megan offered you a ride?” I tried to take the incredulous tone out of my voice, but it slipped out right at the end.
“What’s wrong with that? She didn’t break up with me, she broke up with you.”
“We didn’t break up. We’re on a break. There’s a difference.” I waved my hands, trying to clear the confusion out of the air in front of me. “But we’re getting off the point. You spent the evening in the company of two psychics?”
Harry shook his head and leaned in conspiratorially. “Technically one psychic. I think we can all agree that, as a psychic, Megan is really, really terrible.”
“But you don’t even believe in psychics!”
“I don’t have to believe in them to know when one of them is, frankly, not very good. Of course, I didn’t say this to her face.”
“Of course you didn’t. So they drove you to the drug store.” I gestured for him to get on with his story.
“Yes, and then they asked me if I wanted to continue on with them to dinner and, since I didn’t have plans this evening, I agreed.”
“So you went to dinner?”
Harry’s face widened into an annoying grin. “Well, we never technically got around to dinner. We did what, in my day, we called a pub crawl.”
“You went out drinking.”
“Technically,” he said, using that same word again, “We were wine tasting. Buster, did you know wine comes in flights?”
“Yes, I am aware wine comes in flights.”
“Well, it was news to me. They are flights of fancy, let me tell you. So at each bar we’d order an appetizer and a flight or two and sip and compare. A very civilized way to spend an evening, if you ask me.”
“Actually, I’m sorry I asked you. So you got soused with a pair of psychics?”
“Franny didn’t drink. We called her the designated psychic.” He gave the line a far bigger laugh than it deserved.
“So you got drunk with my girlfriend.”
“She’s not your girlfriend. You’re on a break.” Before I could respond, he stood unsteadily to his feet. “Buster, can you open the store for me in the morning? I think I may want to sleep in.”
“Sleep in? You mean you want to sleep it off. Sorry, I can’t. I need to be on the movie set with Jake.”
“Well, that’s fine,” he said amiably. “The shop can stay closed. I can’t imagine we’d have much foot traffic tomorrow. Good night, Buster.” Before he rounded the corner to his bedroom, he turned back toward me. It took him a moment to remember why he had stopped. “Oh, yes. Can you shut the light off when you go? That’s a good fellow.”
I sat at the table for a while until I heard the steady snore that signaled he was asleep. And then I went up to my own apartment and climbed into my own bed. I pulled up Double Indemnity on Netflix on my iPad and watched it for a while. It was as good as I’d remembered it, but I fell asleep before it was over and never did learn if Walter Neff dies in the end.
* * *
“This place is spooky as hell.”
I
t was early the next morning and Jake was whispering to me as we made our way down the craft services table, loading up on a breakfast of feather-light Western omelets, fresh fruit, yogurt and a wide selection of mouth-watering Danish. Around us, people were eating and laughing and getting ready to start their day of filmmaking.
“What do you mean?” I whispered back. “Everyone seems to be in a great mood.”
“That’s what I mean. It’s weird. Look at them.”
He gestured across the small clearing from where the food had been set up. Walter, the director, was laughing with the two producers, Donna and Arnold. Noël was hanging on Walter’s arm. They were acting like they were private guests at the best cocktail party ever.
“Why is everybody so happy?” I whispered.
“Not everybody.” He tilted his head to the left and I turned to see Stewart, the writer, glaring at…well, everyone. He clutched a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hands, his eyes grim slits as he surveyed all the activity around him. He was giving the same look he’d given when both of us spotted Jake and Noël canoodling in the woods.
“The writer is still pissed off,” I said, recapping the situation. “The plot of the movie has imploded, the producers have lost half their funding. Yet they’re yucking it up.” I turned to Jake. “You’re right. This is weird. Why are they so happy?”
“Not sure. But my best guess is because they still have Plan B: Kill the leading man.”
We grabbed some utensils and found two open seats at one of several picnic tables that had been set up for crew meals.
“So Noël is back together with Walter?” I asked as we settled into our seats.
“I didn’t know they were apart,” Jake said, using far more acting ability than I would have given him credit for.
“Oh, come on,” I said quietly. “I saw the two of you. In the woods. You know.”
He gave me a perplexing look that seemed genuine. “What?”
“The two of you. In the woods. Canoodling.”
A look of recognition passed across his face. “Oh, that,” he said, cutting into his omelet. “That was just acting.”
“From where I was standing, that was an Oscar-worthy performance,” I said, sounding far more like a fourteen year-old boy than I intended.
“We were rehearsing,” Jake said. “We had a love scene coming up and that’s what actors do.”
“Wow. And they pay you and everything.”
“Don’t be a dork. Love scenes are hard to make look real and it helps if the two actors have already established some chemistry.”
“Chemistry, right,” I said, nearly snorting into my orange juice. “Pull the other one.”
“It was actually sort of weird,” he admitted quietly. “Noël and I have a bit of history. A couple years back, I dated her roommate out in LA and it ended badly.”
“How badly?”
Jake shrugged. “My timing was bad. She was an actress, too. She’d had a run of bad luck with auditions, her career—such as it was—had tanked, and then I broke up with her. That was sort of the last straw. She quit the business and went back home to Ohio. Noël was super pissed at me.”
He gestured toward Noël, who was laughing a little too loud and a little too long at something Walter had said. “You may find it hard to believe, but that girl has a temper on her. I mean, a Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction temper.”
Before I could tell him that it was, in fact, hard to believe, he moved on to a new topic. “So, the police were out here yesterday to talk to me,” he said. “Something about someone from the reunion that died. A suicide or something. Howard Washburn? I had no memory of the guy, did you?”
I shook my head. “Me neither,” I said. “Although, from what I’ve heard, they don’t really think it was a suicide. Actually, they seem to think Trish might be involved in some way. She doesn’t have an alibi,” I added.
“Interesting,” Jake said. “Very interesting. First they think she offed her husband, and now one of his compatriots. She’s a very busy girl.”
“She didn’t do it,” I said too emphatically. Jake shot me a look. “She volunteers at a homeless shelter, for God’s sake. She was homecoming queen. People like that don’t commit murder.”
“On the contrary,” he said. “That’s exactly who I would suspect if this were a movie.”
“But it’s not a movie.”
“Neither is this, but we’re still at it,” Jake said, gesturing to the army of crew members who were wrapping up breakfast and preparing for their day of shooting. “Our central mystery has been blown out of the water, our main character is just a hack who screwed up, and now everyone and his brother knows the method behind The Bullet Catch.”
“Well, they know one method,” I said, biting into a strawberry that was way too big and juicy for this time of year. I considered the volume of pesticides I was consuming and then decided to throw caution to the wind and have another one. A hand shot in and grabbed my wrist as I reached for the second strawberry.
“What do you mean, one method?” I looked up to see Walter, the movie’s director. He was holding my wrist tightly as I tried to pick up the strawberry. He wore his signature baseball cap and sunglasses. I couldn’t see his eyes but I could sure feel his grip around my wrist. “There’s more than one way to do The Bullet Catch?”
“Sure. I mean, it’s like just about any magic trick. There are a lot of different methods to doing The Bullet Catch,” I said, taking the strawberry from the plate with my free hand.
Walter hung onto my wrist. “There’s another way to do it? That hasn’t been revealed?”
I nodded while biting into the strawberry. I chewed it quickly, sensing he was looking for a prompt answer. “The audience may now know one way to do it because of that article, but you could simply use a different method and still fool them.”
“So we could still fool them,” he repeated quietly, finally releasing my wrist. “With another method.” He stared up into the trees overhead. “The audience will think we’re using the method they know and that’s what they’ll be looking for. But we won’t. We’ll use a different method.” He turned and sat between us, the wooden bench creaking under his weight. He scratched at his chin thoughtfully.
“Magicians often did that after Terry revealed the method behind an illusion,” I said, not entirely certain he was hearing me. “They’d just switch the method, which was double confusing for the audience, because it played on their preconceptions on how the trick was done. In many cases, it made for a more effective illusion.”
“We’ll do it all in one shot,” Walter said, taking off his sunglasses and turning to Jake. “Seamless. From the moment Terry starts the act right through to when he gets shot. All one continuous take.”
Walter then turned to me. His eyes were watery and bloodshot. “And you, Mr. Magic,” he said, putting a chubby arm around my shoulder. “You will not only be our consultant on it, but I’m putting you in the movie. You, my friend, are the one who is going to shoot Terry Alexander.”
Chapter 16
This new plan required an immediate meeting with the producers, Donna and Arnold. Huddled in the tented area that housed the video monitors—video village, as it was referred to by the crew—Walter outlined his plan for a new ending sequence for the movie that, in his mind, would put it on the cinematic map.
“It will be one continuous shot,” he said breathlessly, “Taking us from the beginning of the trick, through each of the steps, right through to the final, fatal blast.”
I noticed Jake wince a bit at Walter’s choice of words, but he nodded along with the producers while the director made his impassioned pitch.
“Not since Children of Men has the cinema been graced with such a minutely choreographed set piece. Goodfellas. The Player. Touch of Evil. Those are the films that will be mentioned in the same hushed tones as our
film.” He stepped back and looked at them one at time. “We have the choice here, people, to make a movie or to make art. I, for one, vote for art.”
“It will cost money that we don’t have,” Arnold said slowly.
“I’ll cut my fee,” Walter said.
“In half?” Donna ventured.
“By a third.”
“How about your points?”
He shook his head. “Points demonstrate my commitment to this project. Points are sacred.”
Arnold and Donna exchanged a look. “Give us a minute to talk about it.” They retired to a corner of the tent and began to confer quietly. Walter turned to us and clapped his hands together gleefully. “This is going to be sweet,” he said with a giggle.
Jake offered a halfhearted smile. A thought occurred to me.
“Walter,” I began.
“Magic Man, speak,” he replied dramatically.
“You know a lot about movies, right? Trivia and stuff.”
“There is nothing about the cinema that is trivial,” he said, continuing to intone his words. “But, yes, I’m a fount of useless information about movies.”
“Great,” I said, trying to think of the right way to phrase the question. “In the world of movies, what do you think of when you hear the name ‘Francis?’”
“Easy. Frances Farmer. Brilliant actress, tortured soul.”
I considered this. “Anything else come to mind around the name Francis?”
“Frances McDormand. Also brilliant. Much less tortured.”
“What about on the male side of the equation?”
He thought about this for a long moment. “Well, Francis Ford Coppola, of course. Great filmmaker. Great winemaker. Could have retired after The Godfather and still been considered one of the best. Although,” he added thoughtfully, “then we would not have experienced the stunning perfection of The Conversation.”
He continued to ponder my question and was about to add to his list when Donna approached, with Arnold two steps behind.
