Bloody River Blues: A Location Scout Mystery (26 page)

Penny did not continue her thought but instead crossed her heart like a coy schoolgirl. “Promise.” She
nodded broadly, acknowledging, though she probably didn’t know it, her excessive sincerity.

There were some moments when Penny appeared completely normal. Her hair would be shiny clean and curled nicely, her face—from the right angle—was soft, her collar turned up, covering the dark bones of her shoulders. Her hands would be folded; the torn cuticles and ragged ripped nails were out of view. A dancing light would be in her eyes—a little mystified, a little shy. It was charming.

At those times, Donnie Buffett remembered the woman he had fallen in love with.

He listened to her tell him about how she and her friends were going to be chanting for him.

“Chanting,” Donnie Buffett said, and was suddenly tired. Exhausted. He closed his eyes and suddenly all he wanted was to fall back to sleep. The sleep in which he dreamed of pain flowing through muscles that now felt no pain. Fatigue wrapped around him sensuously and squeezed tight like a college girl making desperate love.

“I’m beat, honey,” he muttered, pretending to doze.

“You should sleep,” Penny said. She touched his hand.

“Uh-huh.” Buffett almost opened his eyes and looked at her. But he chose not to. He felt momentarily guilty about this deception.

I’m a lucky man. Lucky lucky lucky. I didn’t get shot in the brain. I didn’t get shot in the heart. I didn’t get shot in the neck. I can still smell.

And he could hear her voice in a detached little whisper, “You sleep now, honey. I’m going home.” He
heard paper crinkle. “These are the instructions for the candle.”

Donnie Buffett breathed deeply like a man asleep. And in less than a minute this lie became the truth and he was dreaming that he was skiing down a panoramic mountain of huge white cliffs rising into an infinitely blue sky.

HALFWAY TO ST
. Louis, Stevie saw his chance. He gunned the engine and the car sluggishly responded, moving ahead of a lumbering truck.

He eased up right behind the Yamaha. A dirt bike, it looked like, with the high fenders that doubled as mudguards and the long shocks that would take the potholes and shitty city streets easily. The rack was cockeyed. Stevie studied the yellow fenders and the silver bars and the red helmet and the leather jacket of the driver and then started looking for an exit ramp.

He saw one a half mile ahead and glanced in the rearview mirror, at what loomed behind him. It was a White semi. Not the trailer, just the tractor, the sort with the ten forward gears and a steering wheel wide as a tire. The truck would have air brakes and little weight, but at sixty it’d skid for a hundred fifty feet.

A quarter mile away.

Stevie Flom started signaling.

He accelerated until he was three feet from the beer man, who was hunched forward, sunlight flaring off his helmet. The truck driver was holding back, seeing Stevie’s turn signal but maybe a little confused because the Dodge was not slowing.

A hundred yards.

Stevie eased into the left side of the lane.

The truck driver must have figured the signal was a mistake and had accelerated again, driving up to within two car lengths of Stevie. On the right, the exit ramp blossomed outward.

Stevie floored the pedal and looked to his right, then cut the wheel hard.

His left front bumper goosed the rear wheel of the Yamaha right out from underneath him.

A mad flurry of motion from the bike—a panicked glance over his shoulder as the Yamaha began to lie down. The horn and the gutsy squeal of the truck’s brakes filling the air. The man’s left boot slamming down onto the highway in an automatic way, hopeless. Reaching up, pitching forward, flying over the twisted handlebars.

Sparks sailing off the gas tank of the cycle. The beer man, his mouth open in a shout that Stevie could not hear, hands outward, began to tumble on the concrete at fifty miles an hour, the fiberglass of the helmet shredding.

Stevie skidded the Dodge into the off ramp, just missing a yellow plastic collision barrel as he braked to twenty-five. He was too busy controlling the skid to see exactly what happened on the expressway. Then he was at the bottom of the ramp. He heard the squealing of tires and horns. Then he caught the end of a yellow light and made a leisurely turn onto a grimy, cobblestoned street of body shops and empty warehouses and shabby bungalows, not far from the Mississippi River.

THE SERVICE WAS
in a boxy building in downtown Maddox.

Beth Israel Memorial Chapel.

Pellam hadn’t known that Stile was Jewish. They had talked about many things, from women to whiskey to real estate, but religion was in that category of topics where their conversation did not go—for instance, why Stile remained in his profession and never sought to do second-unit directing, as so many stuntmen do. Or why Pellam stopped directing after Tommy Bernstein died.

Pellam had spoken to Stile’s cousin in San Diego—his closest living relative—and he had learned that Stile had been raised Reform Jewish. Calls were made, and a service arranged.

The body was en route to southern California and 168 people now stood in a dark building in a shabby part of a dark Missouri town that had long ago lost whatever allure, or novelty, it might have had for them. From the outfits, this seemed more like a fashion show than a service: No one had brought funeral clothing, of course, but this was a Hollywood crew so there was plenty of black, albeit in the form of minidresses
and spandex and baggy suits. Adding to the surrealness were the yarmulkes perching on the men’s heads.

The stunt coordinator, Stile’s boss, was a tough sixty-five-year-old with blurred tattoos on his forearms, now covered by the sleeves of a wrinkled gray suit. He had fallen off horses at John Ford’s direction and crashed through windows at Sam Peckinpah’s and he was now crying like an infant. A lot of other people cried too. Nobody had disliked Stile, the man who fell from 130-foot cliffs and who walked through fire.

Pellam had no idea what to say, not to anyone. Stile had died because of him. The Yamaha had been the property of the Missouri River Blues Partnership and when Pellam had turned over the location forms and files to Stile, according to Sloan’s orders, Pellam had added, “Take the Yamaha, too, if you want it. Tony’s gonna make me give it back sooner or later.” Stile thanked him, left the rental car at the campground for Pellam’s use, and burned rubber away to the interstate. He had a date in St. Louis with Hank the lawyer about location releases for the infamous final shootout scene in
Missouri River Blues
.

What could Pellam say?

He put his arm around the shoulders of one of the young actresses and let her cry. Pellam smelled bitter hair spray and cigarette smoke. She wasn’t hysterical. She trembled. Pellam didn’t cry. He went to a pew and sat next to several other crew members, older men, gaffers. A rabbi—or maybe just the funeral director—walked to the front of the room. He began talking. Pellam did not pay attention to the words; they were not, for him at least, important. The purpose of
the ritual had nothing to do with Stile, not now. It was not the sermon but the interval it occupied—this hour in a woody, mute room with a respectful velvet hat on your head—that was the point: a block of time reserved solely for death.

Pellam heard the drone of the speaker’s words, a soft baritone.

He wished he knew how to pray.

He decided he would suggest that Sloan dedicate
Missouri River Blues
to Stile, a film that had turned out to be not the product of artistic vision at all but simply one hell of a stuntman’s movie.

No, not suggest. Whatever else there was between Sloan and him, Pellam would
insist
on the dedication. It was something he could do.

But it wasn’t enough.

WHAT STEVIE FLOM
was going to say: First, you didn’t describe the guy very well. Second, the guy walked out of the camper and got on the cycle. Third, you should’ve done it yourself . . .

He got as far as “First—” before Ralph Bales grabbed his Members Only black jacket by the lapels and slammed the terrified Stevie into the wall of Harry’s Bar.

“Gentlemen.” The bartender wagged a finger but in a lethargic way. This was a dingy, Lysol-scented place overlooking one of the less picturesque refineries in Wood River, Illinois. It was that sort of bar, where the management would let two men—two
white
men, not too drunk or strung-out—go at it. Up to a point.

Ralph Bales looked from the frightened eyes of
Stevie Flom to the cool eyes of the bartender and let go. He had been right on the borderline but now decided not to break his partner’s nose. Stevie slumped and ran his fingers through his razor-cut hair. “Aw, Ralph, come on.”

Ralph Bales turned and walked through the bar into the restaurant behind. He slid into one of the booths. Stevie followed him like a butt-swatted puppy and sat opposite.

Ralph Bales said, “You’re an asshole.”

“First, what it was, he walked out of the camper and got on the Yamaha. How was
I
supposed to know there’d be somebody else inside? You said he’d be riding a bike. And like, anyway, you didn’t describe him.”

“Shut up and listen to me. Lombro is
really
pissed now.”

“It wasn’t my fault.”

“Excuse me, I mean, excuse me? When’re you gonna learn that guys like this don’t
think
about fault. What’re you going to say? ‘Gee, Mr. Lombro, first I shot a cop and now I killed the wrong man but I’ve got an excuse’?”

“Did you tell him I did it?” Stevie whispered.

To Ralph Bales’s glee the kid was seriously nervous now. He let Stevie hang in the wind for some very lengthy seconds. “I didn’t tell him your name.”

“Thanks, Ralph. That was all right of you.”

“I just told him a guy we hired made a mistake.”

“ ‘
We
hired.’ Like you and me, we hired somebody else. So he won’t think it was me.” Stevie nodded. “That was good.”

“He was pissed but he’s not going to do anything about it. He’s not going the whole nine yards with the
bonus because of the screwup, but he’ll give us something. If you do it right this time.”

“Maybe what you could do is describe him better to me.”

“Maybe what I could do is hold your hand and take you up and introduce you . . .”

“Aw, Ralph, come on . . .”

“Look, this thing is running away from us.”

“Maybe we should just vanish.”

“Without a penny? I wish you’d done the cop right.”

“You could’ve, too,” Stevie said cautiously.

Ralph Bales opened his mouth to protest then remembered his gun muzzle nestling in the cop’s hair. “I could have, too. Yeah.”

The waitress came by and they ordered boilermakers and hamburgers. When she left, Ralph Bales said, “Okay, well, do the witness this time and do it right.”

Stevie said, “All right, sure. You still want it to be an accident? I mean, if that’s what you want . . .”

Ralph Bales considered this. “Do it however you want. I don’t care.”

This relieved Stevie immensely and he said, “I just want to say one thing. First, you didn’t describe him very well—”

Ralph Bales turned on him.

Stevie lifted two palms and grinned. “Joke, Ralphy. Joke. You got to keep a sense of humor about these things.”

“HE KILLED MY
friend,” Pellam said, “and I’m going to get him.”

Donnie Buffett was not interested in what Pellam was going to do. Penny had called and chanted over
the phone to him for five minutes while he stared at the receiver, first in disbelief, then in disgust. He had finally hung up and left the phone off the hook. Then he had been taken downstairs and poked and probed all morning. He had been told to contract his sphincter. He had said peevishly, “My
what?
” And the young intern had said, “Your rectum, contract it.” And Buffett had said loudly, so that patients up and down the hall could hear, “Oh, you mean my
asshole?
”

The rest of the exam had gone like that.

Now here was Pellam, sweating and wild-eyed and talking about getting people.

“Look, you steal my gun, you give me a lecture about things you don’t know from, then you come in and you start rambling about some killing or another. What,” Buffett said evenly, “do you want from me?”

Pellam leaned close. Buffett blinked at the nearness of his face, the pores he could see clearly, the way the dark hairs on the top of the man’s forehead disappeared smoothly into the skin.

The look in Pellam’s eyes reminded him of young cops after their first firefight. Eager and energized but also quiet—ironically calmed by death. And because of that, scary. Extremely scary.

Pellam said, “The man in the Lincoln killed my friend.”

Buffett did not respond and Pellam told him about Stile’s death. “They got us mixed up. They saw him leave the camper on the bike and they killed him. They thought it was me.”

“Look, Pellam, it’s crazy to drive a cycle in the city. Accidents happen. I could tell you the statistics.”

“Hell with statistics. I want you to tell me how to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Arrest him. Can I shoot him if I have to?”

The chanting and the poking and probing faded from the cop’s mind. Pellam and his calm, scary eyes had Buffett’s full attention. “Let me make a call.” He was on the phone for ten minutes as Pellam stared out the window. Pellam’s lips moved silently from time to time. Into the phone, the cop asked, “Any chance it’s related to the Pellam thing? . . . Uh-huh. Yeah, well, I know how you guys feel but I’m starting to think he’s okay . . . Yeah, Pellam, I mean. I’m not so sure he
did
see the guy in the Lincoln.”

Pellam’s head turned.

Buffett said, “Well, do what you gotta, I understand. But take it easy on him. It was his buddy got killed.”

When he hung up the cop said, “They’re calling it an accident. Hit-and-run. The truck driver said the car clipped the cycle. The tag number’s from a stolen Dodge.”