Long Shot

by Paul Monette

  They turned off into a narrow lane between two stages vast as hangars. Now the late-noon light was high above them, washing the upper walls as if someone had re-aimed a spot. Greg could hardly see in the sudden shade. Artie parked snug up to the building on the right, got out without a word, and came around to open the door. Greg felt banished. He stood up and paused, with the door between them like a shield. He made a move to salvage what he could.

  “You think we can meet somewhere and talk?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Artie, clearly quite uncomfortable. “I mean, what’s the point?”

  “I’d like to tell you how it was with me and Harry Dawes.”

  For a moment, neither looked the other in the eye. Greg glanced up at the hard-edge line where the sand-colored stucco met the blue of the midday sky. He realized he and Artie had never been introduced.

  “If you want,” said Artie finally. “Why don’t you give me a call when Viv takes off.”

  “Where’s she going?”

  “Away,” he replied, with a rolling shrug of his massive shoulders. He walked across the alley. Taking hold of a rusty lever, he slid a dented metal door along a track. “You’re late,” he said. “You better hurry.”

  As Greg went in, with a sheepish smile, he gave a gentleman athlete’s squeeze to the melon of Artie’s upper arm. He entered the dark, and the door roared shut behind. The first thing he did was stretch the muscles of his face, to rid it of the bullshit throbbing in his smile. Every word he’d said getting out of the car was a rotten lie. He’d made his unavailability crystal clear, but only by tricking it up with a fine veneer of niceness. He hated the taste it left in his mouth. It was worse than if they’d had the sex and got it over and done with.

  As he waited to let his eyes adjust to the sudden loss of light, he began to think it was only fair that Vivien make the next move. He’d expected a little theater carpeted in beige, with stand-up ashtrays full of sand and a cart of fruit and Perrier. He wasn’t a rube when it came to industry aesthetics. He thought he had come to hobnob with studio brass. So where was the movie? What was he doing all alone in an empty warehouse? Vivien ought to take care of him. This wasn’t a place where he was free to go where he liked. There were probably holes in the floor.

  Then the emptiness started to clear. Up ahead, like a dream cohering, he made out a dimly lit sprawl of buildings. Spanish, it looked like. Huddled around a fern-choked fountain, all of it dead as a ghost town. He moved toward it stealthily. He thought he saw a man and a woman embracing beneath an arch, but the shadow fell all the way to their knees, so he couldn’t be sure. Before he had a chance to wrap them up in a story, the woman broke into the open and walked across to meet him. As soon as he saw her face, he knew it wasn’t love he’d interrupted. She looked too furious.

  “Greg,” she said wearily, “please forgive me. It’s just not going to work.”

  So saying, she took his hands and held out a cheek to be cheeked. They touched like the glasses of wine in a toast. Then he moved to retreat, since he thought she had dismissed him. But she wouldn’t let go. She tugged him back to the tile-roofed town, as if to bring him in from the desert sun. He struggled to think of a way to say goodbye. As they neared the fountain, she said: “The picture won’t be ready for a week.” And he saw it was not the two of them that had no chance. It was just a minor systems breakdown.

  “Talk to Brearley,” she murmured, just as a man stepped out of the shadows. “He can get you in.”

  “In where?”

  “Oh, shut up,” she said with some annoyance, as if he were being a spoilsport. Then, much louder: “Max, you haven’t met Greg Cannon, have you?” They all came together beside the fountain. “He’s a marvelous writer,” she added, fairly beaming with assurance.

  “Friend of Jasper’s?” Maxim Brearley asked, on the point of handshake.

  “No,” Greg said. He suppressed the desire to throw in his lot with Harry Dawes, whenever that was asked. It was almost like a wedding, with the ushers inquiring: “Bride or groom?”

  “What have you written?” asked the director, pleasantly enough. But Greg heard a harder version, echoing in from the past: You got any credits? That was the way it was usually put.

  “Oh, I had a whole stack of screenplays once,” said the writer lightly, shrugging it off. “But that was some time back.”

  “He’s been doing a treatment of Walden,” Vivien said, not one to be deterred. “We’ll have to get you a copy.”

  “Do that,” Max replied—looking all the while at Greg, and telegraphing word of his rejection in advance. Then he turned to her directly, lowering his voice by just enough to cut Greg out completely. “Viv, I’ll get us a print. By the end of the week, I promise. We can screen it up at Steepside.”

  “But Max,” she protested, “I’ll be gone.”

  Greg couldn’t understand why this news made him feel so lonely and so broke. He couldn’t afford to go with her, even if she asked. Besides, why in a million years would he ever want to? He hated all this ritzy chitchat as to how the rich passed time. As much as he hated Brearley’s pricey clothes—baggy khaki head to toe, like a Jerry Magnin mannequin. The butterscotch finish on his tassel shoes was the match of the briefcase under his arm.

  “You’ll see it before you go, Viv. You have my word on that.”

  Greg was startled. Did people still give their word out loud? It sounded almost quaint. Max threw his arms around her shoulders—a purely formal gesture, somehow, meant to make a show of comforting the bereaved. Greg could have been a footman here, for all the part he had to play. But he relished his silence like a good night’s sleep. He stood there peering about at the set, still as the Spanish town the others broke the mood of. Let this gibbering asshole have the floor, he thought.

  “Hey, give me a call,” said Max, as he offered Greg a second shake. The message was plainly the other way. There were so many baffles set between Max and an idle phone call. Greg would be smart, he seemed to say, to give it up now before he got started. Brearley was far too big to be of any help. Besides, an untried talent came across as an omen of doom to men with power. A writer without a lot of credits might, without even knowing it, carry a dose of failure like a virus.

  “About that other matter, Viv. I don’t think it’s up to Carl anymore. Tell him that, will you?”

  Greg snapped back to attention. What were they saying about Suspect Number One? Was Max going to let him in on something? He’d either decided Greg was too low down to make a difference or far too hip to try to fool. Which was it?

  “If it does come out,” said Max, “then all of us ought to have a say in how we handle it. Me, I mean to protect my picture.”

  That was all. Dispensing with goodbyes as if they were unoriginal, the director walked away and through the arch. They could hear the click of his hand-sewn shoes receding into the distance even after the dark had swallowed him up. Greg took a breath to apologize for coming in too early. But when he turned to speak, he saw from the antic look on her face that the main conspirators here were the two of them. It was Max who was out in the cold.

  “Pay no attention,” she said, her voice gone normal again. “That type never gets over the junk they make to get a foot in the door. Don’t worry—he’ll read it. If he doesn’t, I’ll read it to him.”

  “Read what?”

  “It doesn’t have to be Walden. That was just off the top of my head. You give me whatever you’ve got.”

  Ah well. He stared down into the basin of the fountain. Now for the first time, he noticed the brown-edged fiddle-head ferns were potted. The stonework around them was papier-mâché. The moss on the rim was thickened paint. And just when he saw it was all a trick, he registered the sound he had taken for granted—a cricket, chirping away in the leaves. It must have got in by mistake, having hitched a ride on a fern. It thought it was safe in a twilit garden. Poor little bastard.

  “Somebody’s misinformed you,” he said. “I’ve put
away my Scripto and my Big Five pad.”

  He would have protested even more, except he was so relieved. Somehow, she hadn’t stumbled on his current line of work.

  “But that was a loss of nerve,” she said. “This here is another chance.”

  She patted his cheek as if to pose his head and walked around him purposefully. Then she went stage left. He followed her with his eyes as she mounted a flight of broken steps. Yellow weeds grew out of the cracks. On the landing, ten feet above the floor, was an iron gate which seemed to lead to a rise above the town. But in fact, of course, it went nowhere. The whole of this village was just facades—with the empty sound stage all around. At the seventh stair, she stooped to retrieve what looked like saddlebags. She called the next bit over her shoulder.

  “Does it violate your principles to use a connection?”

  She stood and faced him, in a white silk shirt and belled black pants, the saddlebag over one arm. She looked as if she might be fancy with a gun. Her head was framed by the iron gate, on which a string of words was wreathed in rusty curlicues. It looked like it must have taken years to make, and a hundred more to get so old. He didn’t see how it could have been faked.

  “Where are we, exactly?”

  “This? It’s an old abandoned mission,” she said. “They did the exteriors up near Santa Barbara. The problem was, the whole inside was a pile of rubble. So they did it here, with the odds and ends of other sets. It’s the end of a trail, you see.”

  “And what’s on the other side of the gate?”

  “The graveyard.”

  “How do you know so much, if you haven’t seen the picture?”

  “I read the script,” she replied with a shrug, as if to play down her privileges. “I’m sorry about the movie, by the way. Ingmar Brearley says he needs more time.”

  “Can you read what it says up there?” he asked, pointing above her head at the filigree line on the gate.

  He already had the clearest picture of the graveyard. Fenced around with high adobe walls, the inner space cooled by a stand of eucalyptus. The mission, no doubt, would be high on a hill, so the summer grass sloped to the ocean half a mile away. The markers on the graves were made of local wood—bone-white crosses and two-foot slabs. One slept beneath the palomino trunks of eucalyptus, hearing the clatter of branches as the sea breeze swept the hilltop.

  Vivien turned and looked along the gateway. In a halting high school accent, she read out the Spanish word by word. “Quiero descansar,” she recited, “con los que tanto ame.” When she spun around again, she was smiling with something like pride. “It’s very pretty, isn’t it?”

  “How would I know? Say it in English.”

  “But it won’t sound half as nice,” she said. “Tell me first about Harry Dawes.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” he said guardedly.

  She came down a few steps and sat. Then she rummaged a bit in her leather pouch. When she pulled out a copy of Walden—same green cover, with the shore of the pond like the shadow across the face of a haunted man—it seemed like a rabbit come out of a hat. He’d managed yet again to let it slip his mind. Of course—this was the reason they were here. Clearly, the book was more determined to find its way to him than he to it.

  “It’s very beautiful, what he says here.”

  She flipped the cover and read out loud a fragment of Harry’s inscription: “You can’t pull up a single flower without the whole universe coming up with it.’ Don’t you think that says a lot about you both?”

  He scrambled for words that would prove her wrong, but she lobbed the book to him underhand, and it was all he could do to catch it. It thumped against his chest and he held it clutched as she went on.

  “Let me finish,” she said, as if she understood what a low threshold he had for supportive remarks. “If I didn’t believe it was good between you, I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to track you down. The moment I saw you, I knew who you were.” She stopped to grope for a way to say it—to tell him how it was she saw right through him. “I mean, you were off on a cloud somewhere. Like you couldn’t think straight.”

  “It’s an endearing little habit of mine,” he said with a snort of irony. “I get bored very easy. Before I know it, I’ve started to drift. Someday I’m going to have to wear a collar with my name and address on it.”

  “I didn’t say bored. It was like you were hardly there at all. It reminded me of—me.”

  There was more of a trick to things between them than he thought. He’d been gearing up to disabuse her. Right from the first, she’d blown it all out of proportion about the bond between him and Harry. She gave them too much sentimental license—seemed to see them honeymooned in a cabin on Walden Pond. But he didn’t really understand the reason until now. She wanted him in as deep as she was. In a marriage that ended up rotten with lies.

  “I hate to be technical,” he said, “but I think the nothing I was feeling wasn’t quite the same as yours.”

  “Who’s counting?” Vivien scoffed. “It amounts to the same. We were both of us left in the lurch.”

  “Well, but not really,” Greg protested, stubborn in this if nothing else. “I hardly knew him. It was just one night.” He held out his open palm as if there were water running through it. He couldn’t think of another thing to say. He snapped his fingers once—but softly, as if they were numb from the cold. “Just like that,” he said quietly.

  All along, he’d kept a certain distance from her, in case she proved to be a simp. He was scared there might be a nasty streak of hearts-and-flowers in her. Now he saw it was quite the reverse—she took an even darker view than he did. He felt an urge to fly up the steps and take her hand and apologize. He’d misjudged her very badly. The third path didn’t occur to him: to keep his distance all the same, lest her case of the bleaks was contagious. He moved to close the space between them, as if it were up to him to turn the tide of betrayal.

  “Oh, Harry and I would have made it, I guess. But I’m very slow on the uptake. It comes from thinking I know all the lines. I’m always waiting for cues.”

  “Does it matter how many nights it was?” she asked, with an edge of real disdain. “You loved him, right?”

  “Well … yes.”

  “Well, Jasper was fucking him too. Now doesn’t that make you feel a little—I don’t know—preempted?”

  “It would have,” he argued. “I’m sure it would have killed me, just thinking about it. But—that’s not how it happened.” He would have loved to add her nickname here, to gentle the bluntness of it. “You see, I don’t think they ever met. I think somebody made it look that way.”

  He managed to get it said without actually saying the word, but murder hung in the air from that point on like a film of carbon gas. Vivien drew back. She raised her head and looked out levelly over the roofs of the mission. For that one moment, the feeling she spoke of was on her face—she was hardly there at all. Perhaps no feeling had the guts to rise to the occasion.

  “Oh, do you think that’s wise?” she asked in a vague and melancholy way. She made it seem like a matter of taste. “I mean, isn’t it bad enough the way we have it now? At least we’ve gotten some of it behind us. Can’t you go some other way?”

  The truth’s the only way, he thought, but luckily didn’t say it. His earnestness could be quite oppressive.

  “But don’t you see,” he demanded after a pause, pressing on with the greatest care, “if it was murder, then you didn’t lose him. Not the way you thought.”

  “Really?”

  She didn’t sound convinced. Didn’t sound remotely interested, in fact. When she brought her eyes back to his face again, he saw she’d left the whole idea behind. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t listen. She was more than glad to let him talk it out. But the concept didn’t grab her.

  “You know what? You need to get away,” she said. “I know I do. Saturday morning, I leave for a month in Baja. Sailing.” She didn’t sound very interested in that, eithe
r. “I know you don’t make very much, but I have an idea. You see—I left something behind in Bermuda. That’s where I was when—”

  She stopped, got up, and started down the stairs. He felt as if she hadn’t completed a thought in several minutes. Still, she wasn’t trying to get rid of him yet. She hadn’t said he couldn’t investigate around her. Even so, he was glad that Edna Temple wasn’t here. She would have found all manner of unsolved crimes in everything Vivien said. He watched as the widow paused on the step above him. He trusted her, God knew why. Perhaps because she went out of her way to put them on equal footing.

  “If you went and picked it up for me,” she said, “I’d gladly pay your way. I’d pay you twice as much, if you thought it didn’t violate your principles.”

  She stepped down onto the floor, and together they strolled across the square. In the cracked squat tower on the other side, he could see the green of a copper bell. He made out a wreath of leaves and berries, cast around the rim. Real, he thought—that is, not gum and paint and plaster of Paris. Real like the wrought-iron gate was real.

  “I have an old house on the water,” she said. “There’s a lot of trees, and a field of lilies. In a way it’s like Walden Pond—except it’s the middle of the ocean.”

  “I have to find out all I can. I can’t stop now.”

  “Well, that’s up to you,” she replied. She wasn’t about to engage with him on the moral point. “I’ll be away, so I can’t help you. Maybe Carl and Artie will—unless, of course, they did it. I don’t know what your theory is. But listen, Bermuda can wait. You can go when you’re finished.”

  “When I’m finished, there’s going to be hell to pay,” said Greg in an even-tempered voice, for once not trying to hide the forties-gumshoe mimicry. He found he wasn’t afraid to say goodbye. They’d had the talk required of them. Till now, he didn’t see how he could ever proceed without her. He’d made her the ground of his inquiry. But here he found she was just another outsider like himself. She was better off out of the way.