Abracadaver (Esther Diamond Novel)

by Laura Resnick

  We would be filming two sex scenes the following week. Segments of each of them would be used as flashbacks during various moments in the season’s final three episodes, as Conway struggled to differentiate between fact and fantasy in his own mind. One of the scenes was obviously (obvious to the viewer, that is—not so much to Conway) just an erotic fabrication of Jimmy’s troubled imagination. The other scene was grittier and more realistic, and possibly a memory of actual events from the night of the shooting—though Kathleen wasn’t telling us whether this was the case, and I had the impression she didn’t know. While angrily questioning Jilly on a dark (and conveniently empty) street, anger would turn to lust and Conway would shove her up against a wall and have his way with her in a rough, clawing, and very unwise exchange of bodily fluids.

  So, all in all, it was easy to understand why, by the final episode, Jilly would want to see the cops of the Three-Oh lying in a shallow grave.

  I doubted she would get her wish, though, since the show had been renewed for another year. And although the season finale wasn’t firm yet, I had the vague impression from Kathleen that Jilly would wind up dying nastily, as so many guest characters did on D30. But this plot thread about Jimmy Conway’s gradually returning memory was still new, and the writers didn’t yet seem sure how they’d resolve it, so it remained to be seen whether I’d get a death scene.

  In any case, I would get to keep my clothes on for both sex scenes next week. The fantasy scene and the gritty one each took place on city streets, outdoors, standing up. There was no disrobing involved, let alone partial nudity. I had never yet taken off all my clothes for a role, and although it wasn’t completely out of the question, it was a decision I’d rather not face. (Realistically, it might someday be required by a job I really wanted to do, but I’d cross that bridge if and when I came to it.)

  Fortunately, I knew from my previous experience of working with him that, despite how unappealing Nolan’s personality was, he was very professional about filming intimate scenes. And although we didn’t like each other (I wondered if anyone had ever liked Nolan), we worked well together. Even just doing this first read-through, which was certainly not an immersive acting experience, our characters were already making a connection with each other, and I could feel the potential for interesting energy and tension between them.

  Benoit made a few notes about the scene we’d just read, then suggested we continue to the next one involving Jilly. We were just starting on that when the door opened and a bright-eyed staffer with messy hair stuck his head in the room.

  “Kathleen? I’m sorry to interrupt. There’s a call for you from the location shoot. Emergency.”

  “Emergency?” she repeated, rising to her feet. Her assistant rose, too.

  “A water main has burst right where they were filming.”

  “Yikes,” said Kihm, as Kathleen hurried out of the room to take the call, with her assistant right behind her. “We can’t afford to lose another day of shooting. What are they going to do?”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” said Nolan. “It’s one thing after another since I came back.”

  Seeing my curious expression, Kihm explained, “This is the third week in a row that something has screwed up our filming schedule.”

  “That’s trouble,” I said in commiseration.

  Filming is expensive, and full-length TV dramas have very tight, demanding schedules. In addition to being costly, the problems Kihm mentioned probably meant that everyone had worked extra long hours to compensate for the wasted time and unexpected changes.

  “Last week,” Nolan said, “the whole studio lost power for half a day. Can you believe that shit?”

  He sounded as if he had taken it personally.

  “The week before that,” said Kihm, “one of the show’s equipment trucks skidded on ice when it arrived at the location to set up. The driver lost control—”

  “Incompetent bastard,” Nolan grumbled.

  Kihm exchanged a glance with me, then continued, “No one was hurt, thank God, but the truck plowed into a storefront. It was a huge mess, lots of equipment damaged, the site couldn’t be used . . . We lost a whole day that time.”

  I wondered briefly if Lopez’s buddy in the NYPD’s film unit had dealt with any of this.

  A stab of anxiety pierced me. What was Lopez going to say when we talked about our relationship? What was I going to say? And when were we going to have that talk, anyhow? We’d left things pretty loose . . . and, I recalled, pretty tense, too.

  That led me to thinking about Quinn.

  Is he in danger—or is he dangerous? And how much danger is Lopez in because of him?

  “Oh, come, you don’t believe in that shit, do you?” said Nolan.

  “Huh?” I realized I’d missed part of the conversation.

  “Okay, maybe we’re not cursed,” Kihm said with a self-deprecating smile, “but something’s off, you know? Our energy, our karma. Whatever. Three accidents in three weeks? It wouldn’t hurt to get a shaman to come do a cleansing of the whole production.”

  “That is so fucking California.” Nolan picked up his coffee mug and held it up in the air. Behind him, a young woman hopped out of her chair, took his cup, and left the room to go get him another hot beverage.

  Which was definitely not coffee. He was drinking some sort of designer herbal tea whose leaves were plucked ceremoniously by mute Buddhist saints in the mountains of Sri Lanka and then processed organically in a diamond mine in Finland. Or something.

  Nolan, I had learned within minutes of arriving for work today, had become a health nut since surviving his second heart attack. There being no zealot like a convert, he no longer allowed caffeine, alcohol, sugar, red meat, saturated fat, or refined starch to pollute the sacred temple of his body.

  This voluntary deprivation did not, I noted, make him any better company than he had been before his brush with mortality.

  “Okay,” said Kihm, “if a shaman makes you uncomfortable—”

  “I’m not uncomfortable, it’s just a stupid idea.” Nolan spoke with all his habitual charm and tact.

  “—then how about a priest doing a blessing? Or,” Kihm added with a courteous nod to me, “maybe we could get a rabbi. Would a rabbi do a blessing, Esther?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe if you ask nicely.”

  My parents tried, but my religious education is pretty shaky. Fortunately, we had a very nice Reform rabbi who let me explore the history of Yiddish theater for my bat mitzvah—the ceremony in Jewish tradition where a child becomes an adult—after it became apparent that a more traditional course of study just wouldn’t go well for me.

  “Or how about we just fire the idiots causing these problems and hire some competent people?” Nolan said.

  “Who do you think caused a water main to break?” Kihm challenged.

  “Someone should have known it was going to happen.”

  Benoit, quite sensibly, rose to his feet and made a vague excuse to absent himself from the room until Kathleen finished her call and we could recommence the read-through.

  “Well, I just don’t think it would hurt to do something to create a little positive energy around here, is all I’m saying,” Kihm concluded with a shrug. Then he changed the subject, turning to me to ask what I’d been doing since I had last worked with them back in August.

  The Vampyre, the Off Broadway play I’d been in all autumn, was the only thing I’d done since then that I was willing to discuss.

  “Oh, right,” said Kihm, looking interested. “That was in all the tabloids for a while because of that weird murder where some vampire groupie was bled dry. They got the guy, didn’t they?”

  “Sort of. He died while fleeing the police.” More or less.

  During the run of that play, I had nearly been eaten by that vampire serial killer. Thack, whom Max had drafted into he
lping us with that problem, had found the whole thing deeply distasteful and was eager to put it out of his mind afterward.

  Kihm asked, “Wasn’t the lead role played by an actor who pretends he is a vampire?”

  “Yep.” And pretending was all there was to it. “He went to pretty extreme lengths to maintain that image.”

  “You’ve done Off Broadway?” said Nolan with unflattering surprise.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never done Off Broadway,” he said, as if this were relevant.

  “That must have been weird,” Kihm said. “What was that guy like?”

  “An ego the size of the planet Jupiter.”

  “Wow,” said Kihm, absolutely deadpan. “That must be hard to work with. I’d sure hate to deal with someone like that.”

  “Indeed.”

  We both glanced at Nolan as he grabbed his cup of steaming herbal elixir from the returning staffer without even looking at her. “Who the hell is this guy?”

  I said to Kihm, “He’s making a cable movie now.”

  “Let me guess—still playing a vampire?”

  I smiled as I nodded.

  “I could do a vampire,” said Nolan. “But I just don’t think it would stretch me. So what would be the point?”

  “But would you do it if it was Off Broadway?” Kihm asked him, with an amused glance at me.

  “Fuck theater,” Nolan said dismissively. “Who’s got time for that shit?”

  “So what else is going on?” Kihm asked me politely. “Did I hear Kathleen say that you’re working in an indie film at the same time you’re doing this show?”

  I abided by Thack’s instructions not to tell anyone here that my movie had been canceled, but I didn’t want to manufacture lies about it. So I quickly changed the subject by asking Kihm if he had any projects lined up for his downtime after the end of the shooting season.

  “No, our schedule has been such a killer this year, I’m just going to take some time off. Get reacquainted with my wife and kids.” He glanced at his watch and added, “In fact, since we’re not doing anything right now, I think I’ll go call home and tell them I’ll be working late again. I’m supposed to go to today’s location and film a scene after we’re done here, and they’ll be running way behind schedule today.”

  I didn’t realize until after he exited the room that he was leaving me alone here with Nolan.

  I liked Kihm, but the words rat bastard did briefly cross my mind.

  Okay, Nolan and I weren’t alone, exactly, since there were a bunch of staffers in the room with us. But I didn’t know any of them, and Nolan barely regarded them as people. So there was a real danger that he’d talk to me.

  Seeking salvation, I picked up my coffee mug, hopped to my feet, and turned toward the door.

  A production minion immediately leapt to his feet, blocked my escape path, and asked, “Do you need anything, Miss Diamond?”

  “No, thanks. I’m just going to get some coffee.”

  Nolan said, “That stuff will kill you.”

  “I’ll get it!” The minion reached for my mug.

  I held onto it. “No, that’s okay. I can get—”

  “No, no, you sit,” he insisted, tugging on my cup. “I’ll get it.”

  Rather than engage in a wrestling match, I surrendered the mug. Then I realized in exasperation that, having sent him off to get coffee for me, I couldn’t make some other excuse to leave the room now, since then I wouldn’t be here when the guy got back with my beverage. And that would be rude. (Did I mention I’m from the Midwest?)

  Hoping that Kathleen and the others would return momentarily, I sat back down and resigned myself to enduring a few minutes of conversation with Nolan—who did not, of course, ignore his captive audience.

  “I’m doing five miles a day on the treadmill now,” he said, as if I had asked. “I work on increasing speed for a couple of weeks, and then I increase distance for a couple of weeks. You should try it.”

  “Hm.”

  He talked for a while longer about his exercise regimen. Then he switched to the fascinating subject of his one hundred percent organic diet. Next, we covered the scintillating topic of how young and vital he thought his lifestyle change was making him look. At some point during this deluge of unsolicited personal information, I received my cup of coffee, which I drank while Nolan explained that it was prematurely aging me and probably accounted for the dark circles he thought he saw under my eyes.

  When I realized I was thinking longingly of throwing myself out of the window and onto the slush-covered street below, I decided to change the subject. There was, of course, no realistic hope of getting Nolan off the topic of himself—not without others here to assist me, damn them all for abandoning me with him! But I had to get him off the subject of his health. I had reached my limit and was feeling ready to give him one of my ventricles if that would get him to stop talking about his own.

  So I asked, as if I cared, “How long were you off work?”

  He grimaced. “Four months, more or less. They filmed me lying unconscious in a hospital bed a couple of times early on, but since it was my real hospital bed, it didn’t exactly count as ‘work.’”

  “I guess being back feels good?”

  He shrugged. “I guess.”

  That surprised me. I figured a narcissistic workaholic like Nolan would be delighted to be back in the game, in front of the camera again, and getting the show rewritten at the last minute in order to accommodate a new subplot featuring his character.

  “Do you feel like you came back to work too soon?” I asked.

  “No, the opposite. I think I let the damn doctors talk me into convalescing for too long,” he grumbled.

  I thought he meant he should have come back sooner to prevent Jimmy Conway from losing the spotlight to other characters.

  But then Nolan looked around, saw that the other bodies in the room were ignoring our conversation (and who could blame them?), leaned close to me, and said in a low voice, “I feel like I’ve lost my edge. You know what I mean?”

  “Oh . . . Well, this was just a cold read-through,” I pointed out. “When we’re in costume and on set, you’ll—”

  “No,” he shook his head. “I can’t just wait around and hope that’ll bring it all back.”

  “Bring all what back?” I didn’t feel compelled to be nice to him, but he was a fellow actor and I thought I could guess what was bothering him. So I said, “Look, you’ve been very ill, and you haven’t worked for a while. Not really.” A couple of brief appearances recently as the heavily drugged Jimmy still lying in a hospital bed and muttering a short, drowsy line or two of dialogue probably didn’t count. “So it’s natural to feel a little cold or stiff or anxious. But if you focus, do the work, and trust—”

  “I’m not worried about my craft,” he said, apparently taking offense. “That’s as top-notch as it ever was. What, you think I was just sitting on my ass the whole time I was recovering?”

  “Okay, I guess you’re fine then.” I regretted that I had shown an interest, even for a moment.

  “It’s not focus or technique I’m worried about, it’s edge. Like I said.”

  “Edge?” I repeated without interest, about to rise to my feet and excuse myself for an unnecessary trip to the bathroom so that I could get a break from his company.

  “Yeah, edge.” He gripped my forearm, as if realizing that I was about to flee. “Jimmy is very street. Very gritty. He’s part of the primal pulse of the alley, the gutter, the fresh crime scene, the wailing sirens of a nine-one-one call. He has that energy. That texture.”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t fake it. I have to be authentic.” Nolan’s tone suggested this was a major difference between himself and other actors—including me. I resented this; I also suspected the regular D30 cast was accusto
med to resenting it on a weekly basis. “My fans expect truth from me.”

  “Uh-huh.” I tried to pull my arm away. He didn’t notice.

  “If I don’t make Jimmy believable for them, I’ll be letting them down,” he said tragically.

  “You’ve been making him believable for them ever since the series began.” I hated coming so close to complimenting him, but there was no denying that Nolan’s compelling portrayal of Jimmy Conway was a crucial component in D30’s success.

  “And I have a responsibility to maintain that level of quality. Of reality.”

  Reality? His character was an alcoholic, morphine-addicted cop with occasionally debilitating PTSD who’d been gunned down twice in two years, in a squad so blatantly corrupt that real NYPD cops either guffawed or hyperventilated with aggravation when criticizing the program.

  Okay, fine. Whatever.

  In the hope that Nolan would let go of my arm, I decided to bring these flights of grandiosity down to a more prosaic level to close the subject. “In that case, what you’re talking about is research.”

  “Research?” He frowned thoughtfully. “Hm . . . Research. You know . . . you may have something there.”

  “Go shadow some cops for a few days,” I said with a nod. “That’ll get you back in the saddle.”

  “It’s not a bad idea.” Coming from Nolan, this was a huge compliment. “I guess I haven’t been out on a ride-along with real cops since before we started filming the first season.” He added petulantly, “No cops were willing to take me after the show started airing.”