Sex and Death: The Movie: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 6)

by J. J. Henderson

  Keeping her cool, she said, “Hey, nice horns,” meaning it, for it did appear that somehow or other they had been grown, or grafted on, or permanently attached, for they emerged from the skin at the top of his forehead as if they grew there.

  “My name is Pan,” he said, and waited.

  “I’m Dezira, and this is Lucy. Lucy Ripken.”

  “Hey, Pan, nice to meet you.” Feeling awkward and a little scared, Lucy scrambled for words. “I was wondering if we might have a look around. I’m looking for a guy who was with a guy the other night, and this other guy…”

  “Please,” said Pan, cutting her off. “Please follow me.” He turned around and went through a doorway into a large, low-ceilinged room. He wore some sort of platform shoes designed to look like cloven hooves. Though she could see almost nothing but shadows moving in the red-tinted darkness, the sounds of people being hurt, crying, and laughing grew louder.

  “Hey,” Lucy shouted at his back. Was that little stump a tail? Was it real? No. But a good piece of FX, surely. In any case Pan and all the rest of it was all too fucking weird and she didn’t want to see more people writhing about, getting their butts kicked and their tongues dirty and their nipples scorched and loving every minute of it. This was just like Fetish only much more so.

  Pan hesitated, then turned on her. He grabbed her arm. “You are a guest here,” he hissed, digging his long, strong nails into her arm. “Please, we do not shout at one another.”

  “Ow, you’re hurting me. Let go of my arm, motherfucker,” Lucy said, and grabbed his nose ring. “Or I will remove this ring and half your pigsnout with it.” She gave it a tug. He grunted in pain, then let go of her arm and grabbed the other one, the one holding his nose ring.

  “Thissss isss a promising ssstart to the evening,” he said, applying more pressure to her arm and drawing his esses out into hisses. She nearly cried out, but instead twisted his nose ring a little, forcing his head to the side.

  “Let go, you fuck,” she said, and he did, finally. He stared at her, eyes full of anger—and yet also amusement. “This is not a start to anything, bub. I can’t do this,” she said to Maggie. “Hey, Mags, are you—do you want to stay here?”

  Maggie looked around. Shadows shifted in the darkness. The wet, slippery sounds—whips, paddles, flesh smacking flesh, cries and moans and gasping sudden sharp intakes of breath—continued, but they could see no one, nothing except doors leading into darkness, faint lights, and smoke. A dog barked, or was it a man, and then someone screamed. “I don’t think so, Lucy,” she said, almost whimpering, a scared kid not sounding in the least like Mistress Dezira. “This place give me the total creeps,” she whispered.

  “Why then are you here with us?” Pan said to both of them. When he wasn’t hissing he spoke in a kind of faux medieval tone. The intent was solemnity, but he wasn’t much of an actor and came off more a pompous ass than anything else. A silly little man with hairy chaps and horns, bad teeth and a big dick with a jeweled something or other shoved through it.

  Lucy cut to the chase. “Guy about my height or yours, black wavy hair, goes by Mark, wears black leather sleeveless shirts and leather pants. He was here the other night and left with Christopher Wadsworth—I’m sure you know who he is, since he loves to throw his money around—and Carole. The actress Carole. I know they’ve been here.”

  “Yes, and Wadsworth died later that evening. I do know of thissss,” Pan intoned. “And I know whom you seek. His given name is Mark Cristalli, but here at Moan he is called the Dark Krystal.”

  She let go of his nose ring. “Thanks. So now you know why we’re…”

  “You will leave us in peace if I tell you what you wish to know?” Someone screamed not far away, short, sharply piercing. “And will tell nothing of our little hideaway to the police?”

  “Sounds like a reasonable offer, Mr. Pan the Man.” She forced up a smile for him. “So where can I find this Mark, or Dark, or whoever?”

  He spoke in quiet, guarded tones. “I believe that he and Mr. Wadsworth gambled together. There is a private card room under the coffeeshop called the Downtowner. Fridays at midnight was Wadsworth’s game. And Mark’s.” He stared into Lucy’s eyes. “Mark Kristalli has not been here since the night Mr. Wadsworth left us. Now you may go.”

  “That’s right, Pan Man. Let’s go Mags.”

  “Oh, and Mistress Dezira,” Pan said as they headed towards the door.

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t come back here. Don’t ever come back here or you will be hurt, in ways that will not please you. Do you understand me?”

  She gave him the finger. “Fuck you, Jack,” she said. “Let’s blow this torture stand, Lucy.” They pushed open the door and headed up onto the street. “Aaah,” said Maggie, breathing deeply. “Never thought I’d dig the stench of a piss-stained street so much.”

  “I can’t believe you—a kid like you—could go to places like that, Maggie.”

  “I told you it was creepy, didn’t I?”

  “Two steps closer to hell that Fetish, I would say,” Lucy said, waving at a cab racing past. “Hey,” she shouted. The cab screeched to a halt. “You take this one. Here’s a couple of twenties. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “Thanks Lucy. Bye,” Maggie said, jumping into the cab. She drove off, hopefully towards her miserable middle-class home and not another den of iniquity. Such a move seemed unlikely, given what had just transpired. Lucy flagged another one thirty seconds later.

  She was in bed reading her day’s rewrite work by half past one, and out cold before two a.m.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MOVIE MAKING

  “Cut cut cut cut cuuuuuut!” Paul shouted as the scene fell apart. The impromptu moving street blockade had failed, and a Puerto Rican guy with a crucified Jesus tattooed on his forehead dragged by a pair of slavering pit bulls on chain leashes with spiked collars had charged directly in front of Conrad Platznik as he negotiated the intersection, completely blowing his tortured tango down Ludlow Street. Everything stopped a minute, and the usually mild-mannered Paul shouted, “Do your jobs you stupid fucks,” in the general direction of the go-fers strategically placed along the block, playing passersby but also doubling as crowd controllers and cowherds. Paul had elected to do this scene as verite as possible, given the lively street conditions, and so he knew his people, unpaid interns in this case, could hardly be faulted for letting a couple of killer dogs slip through the cracks and into the scene. But it had to be frustrating, fourteen people on the dollar-devouring clock, every last one of them union scale at minimum. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, then looked at his watch. “But—as you all know time is money and we are burning through it like napalm in Nam here, folks. So let’s do it again.” Manny backtracked to the corner and went around out of sight, followed by Paul and his patient, brilliant director of photography, a fresh-off-the-NYU-film-school-boat kid called Chong. He and Paul stopped short of the corner Manny had just gone round, and waited. Everybody waited. The passersby, real and cinematic, waited. Lucy, watching from the other side of the intersection, off-camera, waited, Carole Wainwright at her side. Carole waited, too, for her father, Conrad, to take his walk while he absorbed the recently discovered truth that he is not her father at all, but is instead her “daddy,” godfather, old friend, mentor, and/or soon-to-be LOVER? Lucy still hadn’t quite gotten her arms around that concept yet even though she’d written it. Same with Carole, who’d confessed to a surprising level of dread at having to play opposite Manny as lover, though they’d been screwing around off-camera for the past month or so. “It’s not about him it’s about the characters,” she’d said to Lucy more than once. “They just wouldn’t do this.” Even though she’d written them doing exactly “this,” Lucy agreed.

  “OK, let’s do it one more time, people,” Paul said quietly, re-composed, and everybody up and down the block collectively sucked up a gut and got ready for Take Four of Conrad bearing his fate down Ludlow Street.

 
Here came Conrad, around the corner, in his classic porkpie hat and sporty old school threads, looking utterly forlorn and confused. He has just read the love letters exchanged between Madge, his wife, and Morris, his oldest friend, and he is angry. Betrayed. Heartbroken. Though standing defiantly tall, he appeared fragile, like a breeze could blow him over.

  Seen from medium range, he conveyed his conflicting emotions in the way he breathed, the way he carried his head, the way he unconsciously flinched away from passersby, as if wounded so deeply the touch of another human being might be enough to floor him. “God, he’s good,” Carole whispered to Lucy as they watched.

  “Yes he is,” Lucy whispered back. “He’s pretty amazing.”

  “Gotta go,” Carole said, and rushed off, headed for the café where her next scene would play. Conrad stopped in front of a variety store with toys on display, as something caught his eye. A toy monkey. The audience will have just seen that same monkey among his daughter’s things in the attic, where Conrad read the letters. He stared into a display window that hadn’t been changed in 20 years, and as he gazed at the ancient, dusty monkey, raw, primal emotion washed over his face. But he was controlled. There were no tears shed. The extras, passersby, the random mix of people created a sense of motion and activity, a striking visual counterpoint to Conrad’s emotional and physical stillness as he stood before the store window, lost in memories, anticipating what is coming: his first contact with Delia since his revelation. Paul whispered, “OK, let’s do it,” and Conrad slowly turned and continued his walk, his pace picking up as he neared the new Italian restaurant next to the pickle store at the end of the block. The time had come, you could see it in the set of his shoulders. Paul stayed twenty feet ahead of him, cameraman at his side, shifting the point of view, zooming in and out, picking up storefront imagery and people passing by, creating the sense of a street alive with history and poetry. Lucy could see how this would work, how Conrad’s story would spill out of itself into a story about New York and the old world disappearing before Conrad’s eyes, along with the illusion of the family life he’d been leading for twenty-five years. A man walking down the street, his life falling apart and rearranging itself with every step. Not unlike the city he has lived in forever, and loved. And hated.

  He stopped in front of the pickle store. The squat, briny pickleman emerged, wiping his hands on his stained white apron, and somehow in the pickleman’s anxious, friendly, brine-reddened face, Conrad thinks he detects something. Did he know? Did the pickleman know all these years that Delia was not his but Morris’s daughter? Did they all know, the entire neighborhood, every last one of them, know that his so-called long-lost best friend who moved down to Florida had been screwing his wife for a whole decade? Conrad nodded, the man nodded back. No words were spoken. The man didn’t know. Conrad sensed that, and this gave him the confidence to go on. He peered in the window of the restaurant next door.

  Lucy now knew that the restaurant had been open four months and that its name in the movie, One Twenty One, was its real name, and came from the street number. One Twenty One, at 121 Ludlow, featuring overpriced, precious, masterfully-prepared Nouveau Italian food. The sister of the actor playing Nick, the owner/chef, was married to the real life owner, which is how they’d gotten permission to use it as a location.

  Paul had determined that the walk and the following scene in the restaurant should be shot in as few takes as possible, and so now as Conrad hesitated outside the door of the restaurant Paul positioned his cameraman to shoot him entering, while Paul’s assistant phoned into the back of the restaurant, where the second cameraman waited, set up behind stacked foodstuffs and ready to shoot the entrance from another angle. The second cameraman had already shot the other part of the narrative, capturing Delia’s arrival at the restaurant, the evident pleasure with which Delia and the young owner/chef, Nick, greet each other, his offer and her acceptance of a glass of wine, and their sit-down with the wine, bread, olive oil, cheese and salami. Now twenty minutes later, as Conrad hesitated in the doorway, Nick looked up and saw him. Nick at first seemed happy to see him but his face fell quickly as he saw the strained, dark look on Conrad’s face. Delia, watching Nick, saw his face change, and she turned.

  The camera in back was done, the cameraman sneaking out through the kitchen to the alley. Chong, Paul’s Director of Photography and number one cameraman, now followed Conrad into the restaurant, stopped in the doorway, and recorded the scene as Conrad approached the table. This is the first time he’s seen Delia since discovering she is not his daughter. She looks absolutely lovely, her color heightened and eyes brightened by her wine-fueled flirtation with Nick. Conrad knows these two like each other, and while this might have been of minor interest or concern to him yesterday, today all has changed, changed utterly. What can he say to her?

  That he loves her. But now, even that simple, straightforward statement feels enormously complicated. He stood by the table, inscrutably looking down at her. After a sweet, painfully long pause, Delia finally says, “Hey Daddio, what’s up?” And Conrad bursts into tears.

  Lucy had written Delia’s blithe words but not Conrad’s tears—but she liked the way it played as she watched from the street.

  “Papa, what’s wrong?” Delia said, quickly rising and instinctively reverting to her child’s name for her father. Sensing his own intrusiveness, Nick slipped away into the kitchen.

  “Nothing, nothing,” Conrad sobbed, and then with an effort gained control of himself. “It’s just…we need to talk about some things.”

  “OK, Papa,” Delia said, all reassurance, a loving daughter. “Do you want to sit here? Would you like something to eat? Nicky…” she called. He appeared in the kitchen doorway, concern in his eyes. He seems a good man.

  “No, no, I’m fine,” Conrad said. “Really.” He’d mastered his emotions. “I…we need some privacy—to talk alone. Can we take a walk?”

  “Sure, Papa,” Delia said. She was fairly certain this would be about her mother, recently deceased, her passing still heavy in their minds and hearts. Daddy—Conrad—needed to talk about her. She gave Nick a look, shrugged, and mouthed “See you later” as she waved goodbye.

  They walked out the door, Conrad with a quick hand wiping away the evidence of his emotional outburst. They turned the way he’d come, and strolled along. “What is it, Daddy?” Delia said, by now a little anxious at Conrad’s strangely shifting mood. One minute hysterical, the next resolute, the next—?

  “It’s your mother,” he said, and stopped, knowing that placing blame was not the way into this. “No, that’s not what I mean. Hey,” he stopped in front of a coffeeshop. “Let’s sit in here. I could use a cup of coffee.”

  “Nicky makes a great espresso, Dad,” she said.

  “Nicky I don’t need lurking around the table right now, Del,” he answered, opening the door for her and following her in. “This is not his business.”

  “OK, so what is it?” she said after they’d sat down and ordered coffee from a uniformed waitress.

  “Since your mother died I’ve been going through some of her things, you know, all that stuff up in the attic, and…”

  “God, I used to love it up there when I was like little, I remember playing with Mom’s old hats and shoes.”

  “Your mother sure as heck knew how to wear a hat, didn’t she?” Conrad asked, sadness now surfacing.

  “Sure, Dad. Some of those old lids of hers would probably seem…super-cool today…I bet.” Her words slowed as she caught the look on his face.

  “I found some letters up there.”

  “Letters?”

  Did she need to know this? Yes, because of that goddamned Morris! “Yes. Letters to your mother from an old friend of…of mine…a man who lives in Florida.”

  “An old friend? Who is he? Why haven’t I heard of him?” She was anxious now, he could see it in her eyes. But he didn’t know what to do except tell her.

  “His name is Morris. Morris Karlst
ein. He and I grew up together. In the old neighborhood. He knew your mother. He was…” his voice broke; he stopped, unable to go on.

  She took his hands on the tabletop. “What is it, daddy? What about this Morris?”

  “No thanks,” he waved off the offer of a refill, and withdrew his hands. He needed a certain amount of…self-containment…to get through this, and the touch of her hands distracted. “Morris and your mother were…I mean I thought they were…enemies…that they hated each other…that’s what they both said…back in the days when we were first married. Your mother and I. But in these letters I discovered that your mother and Morris had, you know, been involved.”

  “You mean like they had an affair?”

  “Yes. Exactly that. An affair. The ‘enemies’ business was to throw me off the scent, and then to give him an excuse to leave. After your mother and I were married, Morris moved away because he told me he couldn’t stand her. But the opposite was true.” He sighed. “They loved each other, and he left to…allow her to be with me. Because everybody knew that she and I were so—perfect for each other,” he said bitterly. “I was Mr. Responsible, he was a flake, a nogoodnik, never held a job for more than a month, always in the hole with money, living off his parents, living off me. Then he left, and everybody said good riddance. Especially your mother.”

  She felt his pain, but also a sort of relief. This was ancient history, and though it was obviously hard on her father, it would pass, for it was not worth agonizing over now that Mama was gone. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Sorry that you had to find this out after Mama’s gone, and…”

  “There’s more, Delia. Please, I’m sorry, I have to finish.” He sipped his coffee. She could see his hand shaking.

  “What, Papa?” she said.

  “It seems like, from the dates and the timing and…it seems that—that Morris is your father, not me.” He ended flatly, and abruptly stopped.