Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7) (11 page)

The kitchen was one flight down, on the basement level. I found Clyde Snapp scrubbing up dishes at a large deep sink that looked as if it had been made of poured concrete. His sleeves were rolled up, showing his knotty muscled forearms.

He heard me come in before I could speak, turned around, nodded, picked up a towel, and dried his hands. “Mr. Tracy,” he said.

“Call me Trace.”

He grinned. “You’re not looking so bad for somebody who had such a late night.”

“I hope we didn’t wake you up coming in,” I said.

He shook his head. “Np.” I knew already that that meant “no.” “I’m awake most of the time,” he said. “Besides, your father called late.”

“Do you have any cigarettes around here?” I asked.

“Sure. What do you smoke?”

“Anything with a filter. The milder the better.”

“Let’s see what we got,” he said. “There’s fresh coffee there on the stove if you want some.”

I poured a cup as Snapp opened a cupboard that was filled with cartons of cigarettes. “I’ve got Carltons,” he said.

“Good. I need three or four packs.” I reached in my pocket for cash, but he waved it away.

“Forget it. I’ll put it on Hollywood’s bill,” he said. “If you need any more, they’re in here and the cupboard’s never locked.”

I thanked him and looked around the kitchen. There was a cot against the wall in a corner. The kitchen looked as if it had been scrubbed with toothbrushes by a Marine Corps punishment detail. Everything sparkled.

“I’ve been in operating rooms that weren’t this clean,” I said admiringly. Actually, almost any room that I spent any time in wasn’t that clean.

“I like things snappy clean,” he said. “When things are in the right place, it makes life easier, lets you get things done.”

“You the only person working here?” I asked.

“Aaaay-p.”

“You’re doing the cooking and cleaning and everything else?”

“Aaaay-p. Everything except standing guard at the gate. I hired some local fellers to do that, just to keep out anybody who don’t belong here. That’s how I knew you was late getting in last night. You and that McCue.”

“Well, you’re doing a hell of a job. I don’t know what you’re getting paid, but it isn’t enough.”

“It’s enough,” Snapp said.

“You been working here long?”

“Since the hotel closed down, about five years ago.”

“Are they going to reopen it?”

“I think so. I think the owner wants to get some free publicity with this movie, so he rented the place cheap. Then, when the movie’s out, he’s going to reopen it.”

“Who’s the owner?” I said.

“Private owner. Not one of them hotel chains,” he said.

“Sounds like everybody’s making out but you,” I said.

“How do you figure that?”

“The owner’s getting publicity for the hotel. The movie people are getting low rent. Everybody’s making a score except you.”

“I’m getting my paycheck. Long as I get that, I figure I’m doing all right. Working hard now makes up for a lot of times when I just hung around and watched my toenails grow.” He went back to the sink and started to load clean dishes into a cupboard.

I looked around again. I was drinking my coffee, leaning against a long stainless-steel table. In the wall behind me was a dumbwaiter door. There were two more spaced fifteen feet apart along the wall. Idly I opened the door behind me. There was a big pulley with a thick rope looped through it. Clumps of dust hung from the rope. A contraption that looked like a metal wedge was jammed into the pulley, sort of like a large doorstop, to prevent the cable from moving.

“I ain’t been using that,” Snapp said.

“No. I can tell. Would it work?”

“Sure,” he said. “When the place opens up again, I’ll fix them up and clean them up. It’s a nice little touch, being able to send food up to the rooms that way. I get a kitchen crew in here and they can do it. Meantime, I shut them all off in the rooms upstairs, so nobody falls down the shaft.”

I closed the dumbwaiter door and finished my coffee.

“The other half of the hotel that’s sealed off,” I said. “What’s going on there?”

“I didn’t get a chance to redo those rooms, paint and wallpaper and stuff. Just as well, because that’s where they’re going to shoot the movie. I guess for their cameras and all, they’ve got to tear down walls and things. Promised that when they’re done they’ll fix it all up. If you can trust their promises.”

“Well, so far so good,” I said.

He closed the dish cupboard. “They don’t like to pay their rent. The first check was late, I’m told.”

I heard someone running down the steps from the first floor.

Sheila Hallowitz stuck her head in the door. “Mr. Snapp. You have a first-aid kit?”

“Aaaay-p. What happened?” Snapp said. He grabbed a toolbox with a red cross pasted on top of it from under the sink.

“There’s been an accident,” Sheila said. “Hurry.”

For about a hundred yards or so behind the hotel, the ground fell away toward the banks of the lake. Much of the land was clustered with trees, but there were broad paths leading through those areas. Closer to the lake, the land cleared into tightly trimmed lawn that rolled down to the water’s edge and the old wooden dock.

Sheila ran fast, which made me sure she was from New York because speed is a survival skill for women there. She led us into a small clearing. A body lay on the ground.

It wasn’t Tony McCue.

It was Roddy Quine. He was sprawled on his back at the base of a large rock formation. His right pants leg was rolled up and blood was oozing out of a large gash in his leg. There was a big rock, maybe fifteen inches across, on the ground alongside him.

Clyde Snapp ran up and knelt alongside him. Sheila took up her post alongside Biff Birnbaum. I saw Tony McCue leaning against a boulder on the far side of the clearing, looking bored.

“Ain’t broke,” Clyde said, looking up at no one in particular.

Sheila was rubbing her hands together, as if washing them of dirt.

“Pretty good gash, though,” Clyde said.

“Did anyone think to call Dr. Dedley?” I asked.

“No,” Birnbaum said. “Good idea, Tracy. Sheila, go get the doctor.”

Sheila nodded and ran off again. She might have a career running.

“It’s not broken?” Quine said to Snapp in disbelief.

“Np. If it was, you’d be screaming instead of whining,” Snapp said.

“It feels broken.”

“That’s cause you ain’t never had a leg broken,” Snapp said. He took a brown plastic bottle from the first-aid kit and poured some of the liquid from it on Quine’s sickly pale leg. It fizzed into a white foam.

I walked over to McCue. “What happened?” I asked him.

“The four of us were out here looking around. We were talking about one of the scenes that’s going to be shot here. The hero—that’s me—is chasing a killer from the house, and the killer gets to the top of the rock there and jumps off. I jump off after him. Or at least the stuntman does. I’m not jumping for this movie. So we were looking up from down here and then that rock there by Horseface came crashing down. I just happened to be turning around and I sort of saw it coming down and I pushed the two guys out of the way and jumped back. But it grazed Quine’s leg.”

“Quite the hero, aren’t you?” I said. “You’ll get the Congressional Medal of Honor for this.”

“Not if anybody in Hollywood finds out who I saved. Hey. You think we can get Hard-on to come back out here and stand under that rock? If you can do that, I’ll volunteer to carry the small rock back up top again. Toss it off right on his empty head.”

“Were you right under the rock when it fell?” I asked.

“Pretty much, I guess. If I hadn’t been looking up and seen it, it might have hit
me
on my empty head. God, I need a drink.”

Snapp was closing up his First-aid kit. He told Quine, “You can get up now.”

I walked past them and clambered up to alongside the rock face until I got to the ledge, ten feet above them.

I heard Quine say, “I still think it’s broken.”

“No. ’Tain’t broke,” Snapp said. “Ought to wash it off, though, and put a bandage on it, I guess.” He walked back toward the path to the house and I looked around the rock ledge, although I’m no detective and I don’t know what I was looking for.

All I saw was a flat ledge of rock, maybe an eight-foot square roughly. No footprints, no telltale cigarette butts, no lingering aroma of expensive French perfume, by God, and therefore the killer is…

I came back down as Ramona Dedley walked into the clearing. She must have been cold because she was still wearing her abbreviated breakfast costume and hadn’t put on a jacket. As I came back into the clearing, she knelt over Quine and quickly confirmed Snapp’s diagnosis. “It’s not broken,” she said. “It’s not as bad as it looks either. I don’t even think you’ll need stitches.”

“I think it’s broken,” Quine said. “Damn this barbarian frontier country anyway.”

“Easy on the anti-American crap,” McCue said.

Ramona put a bandage on the leg and fastened it with adhesive-tape strips. “You can get up,” she said.

“If you say so.” Quine got slowly to his feet. He stood there, swaying for a moment, as if afraid to put any weight on his injured leg.

Finally he chanced it and stood upright, evenly balanced. “I guess it’s not broken,” he said. He looked over at McCue. “Well, thanks, old cock. You know what the Chinese say: when you save a man’s life, it belongs to you.”

“No, thanks,” McCue said, and started walking back to the hotel.

Arden Harden found us in the main dining room of the hotel. “What happened?” he asked.

“A rock fell,” I said, “hit Quine, and hurt his leg.”

“Were you there?” Harden asked McCue.

“Yes.”

“Too bad it didn’t hit you.”

“You are really becoming unbearable, you malnourished twit,” McCue said. “I think I’m going to drown you in the lake.”

He stood up from his seat and Harden moved away to stand behind me. “You lay a hand on me and the Screenwriters Guild will have your ass. We’ll close down this picture.”

“Fuck it,” McCue said. “Sometimes we have to sacrifice personal profit for the common good. I’m going to drown you, you bastard.”

Harden ran as McCue took a step toward him. In the dining-room doorway, he turned and yelled back across the room. “You’ll get yours, McCue. I’m telling you, you’ll get yours.”

McCue waved his arms and shouted “Boo!” and Harden ran. The actor sat back on the stool next to me. “Even accounting for the fact that he’s a midget and I’m tall and he’s a nerd and I’m among the most charming of people, I don’t understand why that man hates me so.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like what you’re doing with his screenplay,” I said.

“That’s nonsense. Writers get their screenplays changed all the time. And what the hell do I have to do with changing his script anyway? Those two morons will do that.”

“Be more specific in your reference to morons around here,” I said.

“Birnbaum and Quine. They know they’ve got a bomb, so they’re going to try to fix it.”

“I guess it needs it,” I said. I didn’t understand films and I didn’t really want to. I guess the movie generation was the one after mine.

“Except that they can’t fix it,” McCue said. “It’ll take a real writer to fix it. One writer with one clean idea. A good movie always takes that: the clean idea. And these chowderheads never realize it. No matter how long they hang around, they never understand. So Birnbaum is going to rewrite one scene and Quine will rewrite another scene and maybe they’ll even make the scenes better, but they’ll make the movie worse because it won’t have one clean idea running through it. Goddammit, Trace, I hate committees.”

“You make this movie sound so grim that if I were you, I’d get out of it. Somehow, anyhow.”

“I can’t get out of it. I’m stuck by contract.”

“Won’t this hurt your career?”

“No. Everybody’s allowed a bomb once in a while. Even Spielberg and Lucas did some disasters. And on this one, I’ll just spread the word that I got forced into doing it and I think it sucks. My loyal fans will stay away in droves.”

He turned around and looked out the window over the early-autumn green. The lake shimmered, slatelike, far away.

“Except for that hateful midget, it’s peaceful here, isn’t it?” McCue said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I hate peaceful.”

“Well, don’t worry about it. It won’t last. Nobody knows we’re here yet. But when the whole cast and crew arrives on Monday, the goddamn press vultures will be following them too. They’ll be up your ass and hiding under your bed and bribing people to tell them what you had for dinner and who you’re screwing and who hates who, and it’ll turn out to be a zoo. Do you know that two of those ditzy newspapers have somebody assigned to follow me around on a regular basis?”

“Aaaah, you love it,” I said.

McCue gave me his grin. “Yeah. Ain’t adulation wonderful? Let’s go get your car before one of those rednecks eats it. I could use a drink too.”

“You’ve got a drink,” I said.

“A drink in a place where you’re staying isn’t like a drink in some neighborhood ginmill,” he said. “It doesn’t compare.”

I told him to wait for me and went upstairs to get the drug bottles from my dresser.

Ramona Dedley was on the floor below mine directly beneath my room. As I started to knock on her door, I heard her voice inside, loud and angry.

“I know what you’re up to, but I won’t let you do it to him. You stop right now.”

I think there was an answer, but it was soft and muffled and I couldn’t understand it. I knocked and Ramona opened the door, only about a foot, and peered out through the opening.

“Oh, Trace.”

“I’ve brought you those pills,” I said, and showed her my hand.

She pointed to the dresser just inside the door. “Would you just put them there, please? I’m sorry I can’t invite you in. I’m not dressed.”

“That’s all right,” I said, and reached in to put the bottles on top of the dresser. “Is Quine all right?” I asked.

“He’s fine. Carried on like he was having his leg amputated, but it was really just a nasty scratch. You’ll excuse me?”

“Sure.”

She closed the door and I waited a few seconds but heard no further voice from inside, so I walked downstairs and collected McCue, who was waiting impatiently for me at the front door.

McCue wanted to drive and I got in the passenger’s side, but as we backed out of the spot, I saw Clyde Snapp standing by the front entrance, beckoning to me.

“Hold on just a minute,” I told McCue. I got out and walked back up the stairs to where Snapp was standing. “What’s up, Clyde?”

“I just thought you ought to know that that wasn’t any accident before with the rock.”

“What do you mean?”

“Son, I been on this property since I was a boy. That stone’s been up on top of that shelf since then. It’s been there through hurricane and tornado, summer and winter, at least sixty years that I know of. It didn’t just suddenly fall off by its own self.”

“You think somebody pushed it off?” I said.

He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that it didn’t fall natural.” He nodded once for emphasis, then turned and went back inside the hotel.

We parked in front of the Canestoga Tavern. Again, the parking lot was filled with cars.

McCue said, “I’ll buy.”

“Fine. But no fighting today.”

“Not a chance,” McCue said. “No one will even recognize me.” He put on a pair of dark wraparound sunglasses.

“Your own mother wouldn’t know you,” I said.

“It always works. And we’ll act like farmers.”

“How do farmers act?” I asked.

“Count your change. Farmers always count their change at a bar. I tell you, Trace, they’ll never know it’s us.”

He led the way cockily through the front door of the tavern. The room was packed, not just with men but with women and children too.

“Here he is, folks,” somebody yelled. “Hooray for Tony McCue.”

Everybody cheered, except me. I groaned.

McCue leaned over and whispered, “Fucking sunglasses fail again. Next time I wear the Polack baseball cap. It lowers the IQ sixty points and no one ever recognizes you.”

He waved to the crowd and took off the sunglasses. We went to a small table for two in the corner of the barroom. Without being asked, the bartender brought us two drinks, McCue’s packed with ice as usual. The bartender was smiling. I guess he had had a chance to count last night’s receipts.

Everyone wanted an autograph. McCue, I noticed, was unfailingly polite and charming to everyone who approached. Being good-humored all the time, I thought, was a hell of a price to have to pay for being a star. That was just theoretical. Nobody asked for my autograph.

Finally, the crowd thinned out. I saw no sign of those two rednecks that had waited for us in the parking lot the night before.

McCue said, “At last. Peace and quiet. Post time.”

“I was talking to Ramona this morning,” I said.

“Ignore Doctor Death,” he said airily, waving a hand in dismissal. “She’s always dooming and glooming.”

“Maybe so, but she didn’t think all this drinking was good for you.”

“Shows how little she knows,” McCue said. “Drinking’s the best thing I do.”

“It’s the safest, anyway,” I said.

“Certainly.”

“Safer than having rocks thrown at your head,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“Clyde Snapp said there was no way that rock just fell on its own,” I said.

“You think somebody pushed it over the edge?” he asked.

“Looks that way.”

“What makes you think it was meant for me?”

“Who else?”

McCue wiped his mouth on the back of his jacket sleeve. “Roddy Quine,” he said. “A gift from the movie lovers of the world.”

“He’s harmless. Nobody would try to kill him.”

“All right. Maybe somebody trying to get rid of Birnbaum,” McCue said.

“Why?” I asked. “Who?”

“Anybody who knows him. Maybe even his mother for changing his name from Irving to Barf.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Except I doubt if anybody was messing around last night with
his
pills.”

“He doesn’t take pills,” McCue said. “He eats weights for breakfast.” He finished his drink and said, “You really think somebody was messing with my pills?”

“One of the bottles was knocked over. You didn’t do it and I didn’t do it. Anyway, I gave them to Ramona. She’s going to try to get them analyzed.”

“Well, this is one hell of a pile of crap,” McCue said. “Somebody trying to kill me.”

“I just want you to be wary. And talk to Ramona tonight.”

“Anything special?”

“Find out who was in her room today. Just before we left.”

“How am I going to do that?”

“Your characters always figure out things like that,” I said. “Where’s your inventiveness?”

“In some scriptwriter’s head,” McCue said.

“All right. Tell her at three o’clock you went up to her room and you were going to knock but you heard her talking to someone. So you didn’t want to disturb her. Who was she talking to?”

“Okay. What does it matter, though, who it was?”

“She was yelling at someone. I thought it might have something to do with today’s accident,” I said. “Just find out.”

“Consider it done. But I think you’re making too much of nothing,” he said.

“Maybe, but you think about this. Today a rock almost got you. Last night someone was messing with your pills. And that hit-and-run accident back in the city? That guy was wearing your clothes and got rundown by somebody who may have been a professional hit man. And just maybe he thought it was you. We’re taking no chances.”

He made no more protests.