Bloody River Blues: A Location Scout Mystery (16 page)

Weiser sat back, her pine green eyes neither cautious nor inspirational, but immensely pleased. It seemed as if by delivering his monolog he’d passed a test of some sort. “It’s going to be a real pleasure working with you, Donnie.”

They shook hands and made an appointment for their next session.

When the door closed, Donnie Buffett exhaled slowly and said a short, silent prayer of thanks. If Weiser had turned inches to the right she would’ve seen the hypodermic syringe that a harried orderly had accidentally left on the bedside table just before the doctor entered the room—the syringe that had been virtually the only thing in Buffett’s thoughts during the doctor’s entire visit. He gripped the head of the bed with his large hands and tightened his ample biceps. He moved up one inch. Sweat broke out. Another huge flex, another inch. He felt as if he were dragging the weight of ten men with him. He reached for the syringe.

No, not yet. Six inches to go.

He inhaled deeply and gripped the bed once more. Another inch, then another.

He kept at it, two more inches, closer and closer. A half inch. He paused for a minute, wiping the slick sweat from his eyes and feeling his heart slam fiercely from the immense effort. Donnie Buffett figured this exertion was good. It was perfect. Because when he injected the air into his vein, the course of his racing blood would speed the bubble straight to his heart and jam it stopped like a swollen piston, sending his whole body to join his legs in a sleep that was cold and deep and forever.

“HOWDY.” JOHN PELLAM
stepped into the hospital room.

He startled the cop, who dropped something on the floor. “Hell,” Buffett snapped. “You scared me.”

“Sorry.” Pellam walked past the flowers, looking around. Dozens of bouquets, wreaths, plants. Pellam wondered if the nurses got irritated, having to water all this foliage.

A pale, pretty face appeared in the doorway. Pellam motioned her in. “This is Nina. Donnie Buffett.”

She said hello.

“How you doing?” came Buffett’s muffled voice. He was contorted sideways, bending down trying to pick up something from the floor, struggling. His face was red and slick with sweat.

“You okay?” Pellam walked around the bed. Buffett was reaching for a pen he had dropped . . . No, not a pen, a syringe.

“Here, I’ll get it.” Pellam bent down, retrieved
the needle, and stepped over to a plastic box that said
Used Syringe Disposal Only.

“No!” Buffett shouted.

Pellam paused, and he and Nina looked at the cop curiously.

“I’ve got to give myself a shot.”

“You?” she asked. “Don’t the nurses do that?”

Buffett stared at the needle for several seconds. He cleared his throat. “I’m, you know, a diabetic. I can give them to myself.”

Pellam shrugged. “It was on the floor. I’ll ask the nurse for a clean one.” He dropped it in the disposal box. “I don’t mind.”

Buffett’s eyes clung to the disposal box, looking heartsick. Pellam reached for the nurse call button. Buffett barked, “I’ll do it myself later.”

“No trouble.”

Buffett snatched the button away from him. “I said I’d do it myself.”

A difficult silence arose. Nina and Pellam simultaneously asked him how he was feeling, and he answered, “Fine. I’m fine.” More silence. Nina turned to the flowers, examined them and refilled several of the vases with water. Buffett seemed angered by this but he said nothing and she didn’t seem to notice that he was out of sorts.

Pellam studied Buffett for a moment and decided he looked pretty good, all things considered. Apart from the red face and sweat, he seemed to be a healthy man lying in bed. The only evidence of injury: He was dressed in a white, blouselike gown speckled with small, pale blue dots.

“Something you wanted?” Buffett asked.

Pellam did not know how to respond. He wasn’t expecting this constant level of hostility. He said the first thing that came into his mind. “You need anything?”

“No. I’m doing fine.” When the silence filled the room again Buffett relented and made conversation. “I get kind of bored, you know. I got TV.” He motioned broadly at the old set as if they couldn’t spot it themselves.

Pellam said, “I guess I came by, one of the reasons, I was a little hotheaded the other day.”

Buffett was being forced to apologize and he didn’t want to. He watched a silent CNN news broadcast for a moment. Tankers unloading in some foreign port. Pellam was just starting to wonder if the cop would clam up and that would be that. He was glancing at Nina when Buffett said, “I started it. You were just, you know, reacting. All this . . . It’s got me kind of shook up.”

“I read in this magazine one time,” Nina said. “
Glamour.
No,
Mademoiselle,
I think. That if you have a serious accident, it’s like you’re a whole different person for at least six months afterwards.” She abruptly stopped speaking, perhaps worried that Buffett would think he was doomed to a half year of mental anguish.

But Buffett was laughing. “Well, it’s got me a shitload of flowers. You want any, go right ahead.”

Nina shook her head. “Oh, I couldn’t, no.”

Buffett glanced at Pellam. “And the mayor came by to visit me. Which isn’t as exciting as, say, the mayor of L.A., since our guy also has the Buick dealership out on 104. He’s that kind of mayor, you
know.” There was a manic edge to Buffett’s voice. Maybe he was being cynical, maybe he was really impressed that the mayor had come to visit him. Pellam couldn’t tell. Buffett broke the silence that followed this by saying, “It’s just so damn boring. TV sucks, you know that?”

“I don’t own one,” Pellam said with more enthusiasm than he intended. “I’ve got a monitor, but it doesn’t receive. It’s just hooked up to a VCR.”

Buffett sighed and began clicking the gray box of the remote control through a series of stations. An old movie came on. He shut the set off. “I should probably get some sleep. I’m still in shock. No, really. Spinal shock, it’s called. Not like, ha, normal shock. Sleeping’s a good thing.”

The script in Pellam’s mind now called for the cop to ask what he had come here to ask: Could Buffett please call up his detective buddies and ask them to stop ruining his life.

But he couldn’t ask. Pellam wondered what stopped him. He believed it was not the fact that Pellam was going to leave in a moment with a pretty woman beside him and go back to his job. Nor was it Buffett’s face, which no longer looked so healthy as Pellam had thought—mouth hanging loose, eyes darting, filled with a fear that he perhaps thought he was concealing.

No, what stopped Pellam was simply that he stood and Buffett lay.

As simple as that.

“We better be going,” Pellam said. “Just wanted to stop by.”

“Yeah.” Buffett nodded. “Good seeing you.”

“What do you read?” Pellam asked. “I’ll bring you a magazine next time I stop by.”

“I don’t read. I don’t like to read.” The mystery that Pellam had brought on the first visit sat prominently unopened under the bedside table.

“You got any hobbies?”

“Yeah, I got hobbies.”

“What?”

Buffett looked from the square of the TV screen to the box where Pellam had pitched the hypodermic needle. “Basketball, softball, jogging, and hockey. Those’re my hobbies.”

AT THE MAIN
desk of the hospital, downstairs, Pellam remembered that he had met Nina when she was visiting her mother. He now asked if she wanted to see the woman.

She shook her head. “I visited her this morning. Twice a day is a little much. She can be a dear, but . . .” They stepped outside. The day had grown overcast and chill. She asked, “Your parents both alive?”

“Just my mother. She lives in upstate New York. I don’t see her that often. We run out of things to talk about after three days.”

Nina took a scarf from her pocket, a long one covered with blotches of brilliant green and yellow. She began to tie it around her neck. He watched the flimsy cloth cover the pale skin at her throat.

She said, “I’m really enjoying that job you got me. Everybody’s really nice.”

“Making movies is fun at a certain level. You get much higher up than location work or makeup and it’s a pain in the ass.”

“The only yucky part is special effects. All that fake blood and those gunshot wounds.” She closed her eyes and shivered. “Why does Mr. Sloan make such violent movies?”

“Because many, many people pay money to watch them.”

“Why,” she asked, “are you looking around so much?”

“Am I?”

“Yeah. It’s like you think somebody’s following you.”

“Naw. Always working. Looking for locations. In fact, that’s where we’re going right now. Find a big field. I need the help of a local.”

“I’m not a local, remember. I’m from Cranston.”

“You’re more local than I am.”

“Is that the reason you want me to come along?” A faint smile on her frosted pink lips.

“Well, scouting isn’t as easy as it looks. I sense you’re a natural at it.”

“Me?”

“I need a big field next to the river. And a road running through it. How would
you
go about finding one?”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess I’d just drive along a road beside the river until I found a field.”

“See what I mean. You’re a born location scout.”

They both laughed.

“All right. But I have to be back at seven. I’ve got a call then. See, I can talk movie.
Call
. Oh, I didn’t want to ask on the set but what’s the difference between a gaffer and a grip?”

“The most-asked question in the movie business. Gaffer’s an electrician and lighting guy. Grips are
workmen who do rigging and other nonelectrical work.”

They approached her car.

“Another question.”

Pellam preempted her. “The best boy is the key grip’s first assistant.”

“No,” Nina said, tossing him the keys. “I was going to ask if you knew any casting couch stories.”

PETER CRIMMINS WAS
a member of the Ukrainian Social Club in St. Louis.

He could easily have afforded to join the elite Metropolitan Club or, although he was a bar-sinister Christian, the Covington Hills Country Club. Yet this was the only social organization he belonged to. The club was in a shabby, two-story building, greasy-windowed and grimy, nestled between vacant lots filled with saplings strangled by kudzu. The inside, smelling of onions and cigarette smoke and mold, was one large room, filled with broken tables and chipped chairs. The club seemed locked in a time warp dating to the year it had opened—1954.

This afternoon Crimmins was sitting at a table with Joshua, his driver and security chief. They drank tea that had been brewed in a cheap samovar. There were four or five other men in the club who would have liked to sit with Crimmins but who tended not to when Joshua was with him. The bodyguard’s presence made them uncomfortable. They, of course, knew all about Crimmins. They read the
Post-Dispatch
as well as the
Ukrainian Daily News,
which reported, respectively, on his criminal activities and on his social, ethnic, and professional endeavors. The latter did not
interest them in the least; any fool can give away money. But a successful criminal is hot stuff. So they sat around him, basking in his dangerous presence. Crimmins gave them status. John Gotti had gone to his social club in Little Italy in New York; Peter Crimmins went here. They believed the nearby streets were safer because of him.

Crimmins and Joshua had been drinking tea for ten minutes when a broad-shouldered man wearing a blue denim jacket and jeans entered. His shirt was dirty. He was squat, though he moved with a certain elegance. Crimmins did not approve of the common clothes, but this sort of man might be a foreman or carpenter in addition to being what Crimmins was now hiring him for.

Joshua said, “Tom Stettle. Mr. Crimmins.”

“How do you do, sir.” Stettle’s eyes swung one way then the other, settling on Crimmins’s mole of an eye for a moment.

“Stettle, is it?”

“Yeah,” the voice said. “Yessir.”

“Sit down.”

He did. The Samsonite folding chair creaked under his weight. Crimmins let the silence run up for a moment. Rather than feeling uncomfortable, Stettle grew more at ease and gazed back at Crimmins pleasantly.

Finally Crimmins said, “Joshua talked to you?”

“Yessir.”

This was not the safest way, meeting Stettle face-to-face. The identification issue later, if it all went sour, but Crimmins liked to see the people who worked for him. You could have a better conversation with someone
when you knew what he looked like. You could pick up on his mannerisms, match them to his words. That helped you decide if he was telling the truth, if he was dependable, how much he could be bought for.

“You’ve been following him? Pellam?”

Stettle nodded.

“The police have been, too, I know. Have you seen anyone else? Anyone from Peterson’s office?”

“Some. Off and on. It’s funny. It’s like, hey, we got the budget for it today but not tomorrow. They’re not there more than they’re there.”

Crimmins had an urge to remind the man that he was making fifteen thousand dollars for this job. But he said nothing. Another of his basic rules, like providing for the family, was: Don’t jerk leashes until you need to.

“Stick with him.”

“This being the country, pretty much, it’s harder, you know what I’m saying? In the city, with a lot of people around, there are more ways to get away, like cabs and subways. You can set up a hit a lot faster.” The measured and respectful tone of Stettle’s reply made Crimmins feel comfortable. He was pleased that Stettle was giving a frank appraisal. Crimmins himself would have guessed it was easier to do this sort of thing in the country.

“All right. Keep at it. Joshua knows where to get in touch with you?”

Both men nodded.

“Thanks for stopping by. You want some tea? Some pastry?”

“No, sir.”

Stettle left the club, glancing around him with studious eyes. Crimmins supposed he was surveying the shoddy paneling job and thinking he could do better.

Crimmins said to Joshua, “Is he good with it?”