by Dave Daren
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Chapter 1
It was a sweltering day in June, and the blazing Arizona sun felt like a searing knife that cut through my skin. I could see how, back when this place was undeveloped desert, travelers made delirious by the scorching heat, would do things like hallucinate lakes and rivers. It wasn’t a whole lot better now.
The air conditioner at Steele Productions was on the fritz, and the cast room full of Sedona’s acting community had that uncontrolled feeling of helpless unproductivity, combined with the smothering, choking, lethargy of energy sucking heat.
My girlfriend Vicki and I sat at the table reading, and I fought the urge to call it an afternoon. We were supposed to be Martha Washington and Thomas Jefferson respectively, but right now, I doubted the film would withstand the first rehearsal.
The writer and director had spent the afternoon at each other’s throats, which should have happened behind the scenes, but apparently the writer had not seen the final screenplay and was appalled at its ever evolving adaptation.
“But,” the writer Alfred Dumont insisted to director Jerry Steele, “I don’t think Lord Cornwallis would have smoked peyote with the Native American tribes. He was the head of the largest military in the world!”
Dumont was an odd fellow, and he preferred to be addressed as The Count. Rumor was he’d traced his ancestry back about a hundred and fifty years and was found to be descended from French aristocracy. It did occur to me the French aristocracy didn’t fare too well in the end, but I guess this was immaterial to The Count.
He was a skinny, spectacled man and arrived to the set each day in full Revolutionary War era costume. He spent the first day explaining to us each article of clothing and how they were used by the fashionable elite of the day.
Now, Jerry looked exasperated, but he clearly attempted to assuage The Count.
“It’s all about the audience,” Jerry explained.
Jerry Steele was a pushy overweight man who wore baggy shirts and old baggy jeans and thought he was Michael Moore. He wasn’t. He was an underachieving ex-news reporter who decided to be a filmmaker, produced terrible movies, and called them art.
I wouldn’t have even dealt with him if Vicki hadn’t twisted my arm to do this movie.
“We want it to speak to our audience,” Jerry continued. “We want to make it relevant and edgy.”
“Edgy!” The Count huffed. “This is history, not MTV!”
I smirked as I tried to figure out what the last year was that MTV could have been called edgy.
“No,” Jerry said. “The American Revolution was edgy, subversive, and dangerous. These people were by all accounts criminals and terrorists, to put it in today’s language. Let’s make it hip and relatable to a fresh audience.”
“I understand your concern,” The Count said with a placating tone that meant the speaker clearly did not understand at all. “but you have lost the very essence of my book.”
Jerry sighed. “Listen, Alfred, why don’t you work on Revere’s ride scene? We’ve got the soundtrack in now, so let’s make him like the original spy, like the Matrix or something. Make him like Jason Bourne, and doing parkour moves off the roof of the Old North Church.”
“Just for the record, would you like to tell me exactly how many popular culture references you would like to misappropriate for this picture? Just so I’m clear,” The Count snarled and then turned on his heel.
An assistant wheeled an ice chest full of bottled waters into the room, and a cheer went up as the condensation from cold beverages sweated and smeared our scripts.
“Community theatre,” I muttered to Vicki as I wiped water off my printout. “Gotta love it.”
She rolled her eyes, and a paper airplane whizzed over our heads.
“But just so you know,” I heard a familiar voice say, “I’m not wearing any kind of wussy costume, what with tights and all. Sam Adams was a man!”
I smirked at Vicki, and we both laughed.
Horace Uvalde was one of our former legal clients. He was a burly tattooed man, with a handlebar mustache, and I would estimate came in somewhere around three hundred very intimidating pounds. The image of him in colonial era knickers … was not appealing. I guess he felt the need to make his sentiments known to the costume director, who sighed.
“The film is set in the 1920’s, Horace,” she said. “So, you’ll be wearing suits and hats, and believe me, no one wants to see you in a pair of tights less than me.”
“Hello, Horace,” I cut in to give the poor woman a break.
He smiled once he saw us.
“Henry and Vicki,” he said. “I heard you guys were in this. Who are you guys supposed to be?”
“Martha Washington and Thomas Jefferson,” Vicki answered.
“How about you?” I asked him. “Who are you playing?”
His smile lit up his face. “Welp, I was pretty upset the city council asked old prick Steele to do this production rather than my own theatre.”
I snickered. Horace owned his own theatre, and it was, well, avante garde.
“So,” he continued, “I was going to run a smear campaign against Steele Productions, all their dirty laundry and all. And what do you know, Jerry Steele himself calls me up and tells me I get to play Samuel Adams.”
“That’s a good part,” I said.
I didn’t remember seeing Sam Adams in the script, and I flipped through it.
“He’s non-credited,” Horace said with a serious expression. “I just get to ‘interpret’ his vibe as I see fit throughout the film.”
I nodded and knew exactly what Jerry had done. It was a non-speaking appeasement part. It reminded me of a high school play I’d acted in, where there was a girl who ad-libbed a line. She was a freshman, and it was her first production. She had a two line part, and threw in an extra line on opening night. So, the next play, she got cast as a deaf-mute. She played the part with integrity and never seemed to get the joke was on her.
“The Adams was a bootlegging whiskey family,” Horace went on. “They were all rebels and outlaws and bootleggers, and I like beer, and I like rebels. So, I thought it would be the perfect part for me.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m glad for you, Horace. You’ll play the part great.”
“Damn right I will,” he chuckled and wiped his brow. “Well, if they ever fix the AC in here.”
He excused himself in search of water. Once he was gone, Vicki turned to me.
“Remember once upon a time,” she said, “in that alternate universe, when we lived in L.A., and all the actors we knew were professionals?”
“We lived in L.A.?” I joked.
She laughed. “I have a vague recollection of that.”
It had been eight months since we moved from Los Angeles to Sedona. Already it seemed like it was a different lifetime.
Vicki pulled her dark hair into a ponytail and sighed as she looked over her annotated script. Vicki was gorgeous, and the longer we were together, the more beautiful she became.
She was Korean-American and had silky black hair that hit just past her shoulder blades. Tonight, she looked every bit the youthful part of twenty-five, with black skinny jeans, platform wedge sandals, a black a white striped cotton shirt, and Dolce & Gabbanna aviator style shades perched on top of her head.
Our casual, youthful sid
es rarely came out these days. It was nice to let loose a bit. By day, we owned a fairly successful law practice, and we spent most of our time wrapped up in the business of litigating murderers and whatnot. But Vicki was always after me to loosen up, and she was right. I was a bit of a workaholic.
So, when the Sedona Performing Arts League, and Jerry Steele, approached our firm to support the town’s upcoming July Fourth festivities, Vicki somehow got me to do it. But it wasn’t without a fair amount of groveling from Jerry over a horrible online hit piece he’d tried to ruin me with for clicks. Asshole.
Regardless, here we were now, in the backroom of the set of “This Is US: An American Revolutionary Narrative.”
It was a terrible title that stopped just short of its potential for being clever. The same could be said of the film overall. The film was supposed to be a black and white noir period adaptation of the American Revolution, based on The Count’s historical novel. That idea wasn’t bad.
But, now, looking over the script, it was turning out to be I Love Lucy meets The Patriot. All we were missing was the Cuban lounge singer. Eh, well, it could have been worse. The mayor was playing Betsy Ross, the head of the city council was George Washington, and Paul Revere owned our favorite coffee shop. Not bad for company.
“Henry Irving,” Jerry Steele called out.
“Yeah?” I answered.
“You’re playing Thomas Jefferson, right?”
“I declare that to be self-evident,” I said with as straight a face as I could muster.
“Good,” he said. “We’re going to change up some things. Jefferson was, for all purposes, a marijuana farmer. We want to play up that angle. Let’s make it gritty and real, I want him to feel like a 1920’s gangster, like Al Capone.”
I raised my eyebrows. Paul Revere doing parkour was fine, but now this guy was bordering on patriotic blasphemy. Thomas Jeffferson was Thomas Jefferson, not Al Capone.
Alfred interrupted before I had a chance to object. “There is no conclusive evidence that--”
“Look, Alfred,” Jerry’s tone was devoid of patience, “I’m trying to make art here, real art.”
“What are you implying?” Alfred demanded. “That my novel wasn’t art?”
“Your words, not mine,” Jerry scoffed. “Vicki Park? You’re Martha Washington, right? That’s perfect.”
“Why is that?” she said.
“In this new scene,” Jerry said as he handed Vicki a sheaf of papers, “we contend Thomas Jefferson might have had an illicit affair with Martha Washington. She made a deal with him for the ballot of the first American presidency, and that’s why Jefferson was the third and not the first president. So, I’ve got an extra scene here, where they discuss their deal in a backroom of the continental congress.”
Vicki cleared her throat, and she and I looked over the scene. It looked like things with Martha and Thomas got a bit R rated in the backroom of Independence Hall.
“Is this historically accurate?” I asked Jerry.
“No,” The Count huffed. “It most certainly is not!”
Then The Count finally stormed out of the room, and Jerry went after him. The cast broke up, and the volume in the room rose to a crescendo.
Vicki and I just glanced at each other and laughed at the absurdity. In one corner, a group of college students did acting stretches, and an older couple paced the room saying tongue twisters.
“Peter piper pecked a peckled of p---p-p,” the woman groaned to her husband. “I can’t get it.”
“You think anyone would notice if we left right now?” I whispered to Vicki.
“What?” she laughed. “And miss our porno scene?”
A paper airplane contest started, using pages of discarded script, and that’s when AJ met up with us.
AJ Castillo was the third member of our law firm and worked as our investigator-paralegal. She had long dark hair, large dark eyes, and that sort of emo-goth edge she could still pull off at nineteen. Today, she wore black short shorts, with a white tank top and black suspenders.
“Hey.” She smirked and shook her head. “Is this what Dante’s hell is supposed to look like?”
“It’s what it’s supposed to feel like,” I muttered as I fanned out my t-shirt.
Next to us, the leading lady, a twenty-year old named Allison, sat on the table and ran lines with her co-star Ken. They were supposed to play an innocent couple who get caught up in the revolution against their will, and then he dies. So, they got to his death scene in their rehearsal, and he fell down on the floor and knocked over a couple of folding chairs in the process. Then she kneeled down with him and fake sobbed very loudly.
“Who are you playing?” Vicki asked AJ.
“Who knows,” she said with a shrug. “I’m doing costumes, I think. I don’t know why he wanted me here today.”
A quartet of men near us did voice warms up by singing scales, “La-la-la-la.”
I rolled my eyes. “Community theatre.”
“Ridiculous.” AJ shook her head in their direction and then turned to me. “I did high school theatre, too, you know.”
“Really?” I responded. “I didn’t know that about you.”
“I was always crew,” she said, “but the theatre teachers still talk about you.”
“Is that right?” I said with a smile.
“Yeah,” she said. “They were always telling us about this guy in the class of ‘09 who got into Julliard, and how it’s possible if you work hard, blah blah blah.”
I laughed. “Well, I’m glad I’m the inspiration for blah blah blah.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I remembered that the other day, and it just occurred to me that the guy was you.”
It was true. Once upon a time, in what seemed like five lifetimes ago, I’d been a theatre student at Sedona High School. I was pretty into it, did competitions, and won a lot of awards. At the insistence of my drama teachers, I applied and got accepted into Julliard--the Harvard of Sedona quirkiness.
I considered it, I really did. But, as much as I enjoyed acting, the artistic lifestyle never appealed to me. Maybe it had to do with growing up in a family where family functions included improv and five hour live renditions of All Along the Watchtower.
I could have gone that route, and I knew where it led. I guess I kind of felt like I’d already lived that life, watching my parents and their various compadres go through it. I wanted my own path. So, I disappointed them pretty bad by turning down Julliard and going to UCLA where I eventually became a lawyer.
Jerry re-entered the room and clapped his hands. “People, we’re going to wrap for today. Let’s reconvene for tomorrow.”
“Thank God,” I muttered to Vicki, and she nodded in agreement.
We gathered our things, and Jerry turned to AJ.
“You,” he pointed to her, “I’ve heard you read poetry at Voltaire’s Place.”
“Well,” AJ said, “I have done that a few times. But it’s something I--”
“You’ll do,” Jerry interrupted. “We need more writers. You up for scriptwriting?”
“Well, uh,” AJ stammered. “I’ve never done anything like--”
“Are you coming or not?” Jerry asked in impatience.
“I guess so.” She shrugged and followed Jerry into another room.
“That will be good for her,” I told Vicki as we joined the migration of people out of the room.
“I think she’s blocked on her blog,” Vicki said. “Maybe scriptwriting will unblock her.”
“I haven’t read her blog in a while,” I admitted.
“You’re so mean,” Vicki teased as she playfully slapped my shoulder. “She’s a good writer, you know.”
“She is,” I agreed with a nod. “She makes our firm sound so much more interesting than it is.”
AJ’s blog was a pivotal part of the story of our firm, and in some ways, the story of Vicki and me.
I met Vicki at work. I’d just made senior partner at a glitzy entertainment law
firm in L.A. I was running as far away from Sedona as I could and the fast paced SoCal lifestyle was everything I was looking for. In expensive suits and flashy cars, I spent my days doing things like sorting out multi-million dollar squabbles that really amounted to, “he stole my song,” and “no, I had it first!”
Not bad for a day’s work, really, and then from time to time, I got invited to fancy A-list parties and could bullshit with the best of them. All in all, it was a good life.
But I always felt like there was something missing, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Enter Vicki. She was our firm’s paralegal, with aspirations toward becoming a lawyer, but she couldn’t pass the bar in California. So, we had the whole coded office banter thing going on, but we never took it further than that. That was until about eight months ago, when my sister Harmony back in Sedona was accused of murder.
My estranged family called me to come help out, so I flew back to Sedona. I spent weeks sorting through security footage and clues and dealing with her crappy public defender, and a town that had turned against my sister.
Everyone except local crime blogger AJ Castillo, who wrote an interesting post about the murder.
I recruited her help, but we still weren’t finding what we needed.
Then, when I thought I couldn’t take another minute of it all, fate handed me an interesting surprise. Vicki Park, of all people, showed up on my parents’ doorstep.
I was so grateful to have someone who knew what they were doing. So, Vicki and I set up a makeshift office slash love nest in my parents treehouse, and AJ popped in and out as our team’s investigator. It was a necessary measure considering my parents house was full, and the treehouse had ample room for all of us. But now, it seems a bit sentimental, our “treehouse days.” There, in the treehouse, our firm was born.
Vicki and I both got licensed as Arizona attorneys, and we ousted the public defender, solved the murder, and exonerated Harmony. After the dust settled, Vicki, AJ and I decided we had something between us. Vicki was now a licensed attorney, and AJ was a community college girl who’d just helped solve a murder case, and I knew it was time to work for myself.
