KW 09:Shot on Location (6 page)

12.

Jake, wrung out, had slept an hour in the middle of the day. When he woke up he decided to have a swim. He wasn’t much of a swimmer but suddenly he felt like doing a few laps. He realized only dimly that this was a sort of mute
homage
to Donna. Going native, he didn’t bother with a bathing suit, just draped a towel around himself and headed outside.

Bryce was cleaning the pool when he got there. He was cleaning it with exquisite slowness. Actually, at the moment Jake first noticed him, he wasn’t cleaning it at all, just standing on the tile apron, barefoot in his red sarong, holding the skimmer very still and at an angle from his body as though he was about to begin his approach to a pole vault. His eyes were dreamily focused on something in the water, a leaf that had wandered to the very edge of the tiny whirlpool created by the filter. It didn’t quite get sucked in; it couldn’t quite escape the pull. It inched away, spun, backslid, and then the little drama started all over. Bryce watched it for quite a while, wondered how long the suspense could possibly go on, what it would take to break the stalemate. Then he noticed Jake.

“Oh, hi,” he said. “You want to go in?”

“I’ll wait,” Jake said. “No hurry. Finish what you’re doing.”

Rather wearily, Bryce said, “No, it’s okay, I’ve done enough for now. I’ll finish later. Go ‘head, have your swim.”

Jake felt suddenly bashful; New Yorkers, crammed in among eight million strangers, tended not to go naked, after all. Deferring the moment when he would drop his towel, he said, “You enjoy your swim yesterday?”

“Hmm?”

“That guy who threw you in the pool. I didn’t see it but I heard the splash. Fun and games?”

Bryce shook his head with more sorrow than anger. “Oh, that guy. What a jerk. Donna’s boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend? Joey said she dumped him a month ago.”

“Okay, old boyfriend. Good riddance. Talk about a toxic relationship. This was radioactive. Passionate, I guess, but really messy. I used to hear them arguing all the time.”

Jake finally tossed away the towel and waded in. When he was solar plexus deep, his elbows held out like the wings of a chicken, Bryce continued, “Not that I was eavesdropping or anything. It’s just that when the pool pump isn’t running I hear everything. I’d hear them arguing, fucking, throwing things. Sometimes all at the same time.”

Surprised at his own curiosity, Jake said, “So what did they argue about?”

Bryce shrugged. “Name it. Money. Jealousy. Who was flirting with who in some bar. Mostly her career, though. Just a lot of back-and-forth.”

“Her career?”

Bryce laid the skimmer on the tiles and sat down on a lounge. A subtle but surprising change came over him. As if unconsciously, he began to play the mimic, started doing characters. Like a lot of passive people, he seemed to have a knack for this. “She complained a lot about her job.
I do all the work, I don’t get the credit. No one even knows it’s me up there!”

Jake the ghostwriter glanced down at his chilled and shriveled pecker floating in the water. “Sometimes that’s just how it goes.”

“Right,” said Bryce, “but the boyfriend, he’s like sick of hearing it. Ya hate the work so much, why do it? And she’s like, I don’t hate the work. I love the work, ya moron, that’s the problem. And he’s like, That makes no sense to me. And she’s like, Figures that it wouldn’t. A little too complex. And he doesn’t quite get that, so he starts in on something else. So why you don’t stop bitching and let me help. She laughs. Help, right. He says, Like what if something happens to this other broad? She says, You know what? You’re ridiculous. And back and forth and back and forth until finally they break up.”

Standing in the pool, elbows spread out on the tiles, Jake said, “Wait a second. They broke up over
that
?”

“Over what?”

“Over him threatening the other actress.”

Mildly, Bryce said, “Oh I don’t think it was a real threat. Just beating his chest. He threatens everybody. That’s what he does. Some people say hello. This guy says he’ll break your legs.”

“He threaten Donna when she dumped him?”

“Sure. Of course. All the usual drama, tough guy stuff.
You’ll regret it. You’ll be sorry —”

He broke off abruptly because Jake’s cell phone had started ringing. The phone was on a resonating metal table that made the ring seem very harsh and loud. Bryce started walking toward it and said to Jake, “You need to take that?”

Jake hesitated. He didn’t want to take the call. He wanted to pursue the conversation. But before he could actually decide if he would take the call or not, Bryce had handed him the phone and he’d said hello.

It was Quentin Dole calling from L.A.

As encounters with Quentin almost always did, this one started pleasantly enough. “How are you, Jake?” he said.

There was seemingly genuine concern in his voice and Jake assumed this was in reference to what had happened to Donna. That would have been the natural thing, the human thing. Jake said, “Little upset, to tell the truth.”

The answer, oddly, seemed to take the producer by surprise. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s terrible what happened. Awful. We’ve already got people working on it.”

“Working on it?” Jake said. He was still standing in the chest-deep water. Bryce moved a discreet distance from the pool, not that he wasn’t listening anyway.

“You know, managing it. Shaping the story. How it plays with the media. Our lead publicist should just be landing in Miami.”

“Publicist? Quentin, this woman is really busted up. She could’ve died. Who knows what kind of recovery she’ll make?”

“She’ll be fine. She’s union, she’s got great insurance.”

“This isn’t about fucking insurance. It’s about what happened to this person. And you have no idea if she’ll be fine or not.”

“You sound a little upset,” the producer said.

“I just told you I’m upset. I guess you weren’t listening.”

“I guess I missed it. Sorry. But I wanted to talk to you about your book. I’ve had a few ideas.”

“My book?”

“Remember,” said Quentin, “when we were kicking things around, you mentioned a global conspiracy as one kind of story we might do? Well, I got back here and it clicked. There’s this character, maybe he’s a scientist, or a spy, or someone working for a really smart and radical Greenpeace kind of outfit. Something like that. And he stumbles onto something he’s not supposed to know.”

Jake had spun away from the edge of the pool and was pacing in slow motion through the water. “Quentin, I really don’t want to talk about this now.”

The producer went on as though he hadn’t heard. “A new weapon. Being worked on not by any one country, but a whole group of countries. There’s your global conspiracy angle, the paranoia angle: The governments know, the people don’t know. Except this one guy finds out that the weapon is going to be tested. Where? In the middle of the ocean. And what happens with this weapon? It’s so powerful that it basically cracks open the world. So you see where I’m going?”

Jake said, “I can’t believe this is what you want to talk about. I just saw someone bleeding in the water, practically drowned. I can’t think about this now.”

“What it means,” said Quentin Dole, “is that the tsunami that wrecked the cruise ship is just one piece of a much bigger puzzle, a much bigger disaster. And it raises the possibility — just a possibility, now, nothing made too definite — that our survivors,
if
they’re alive, which of course has to stay an open question, are the last people alive on earth. Not too damn much chance of getting rescued then, right? So what do you think?”

“I think you’re being a total insensitive dick.”

That, the producer finally seemed to hear. He fell abruptly silent and Jake went on.

“Don’t you even care what happened to this woman?”

“I care. Of course I care. We’re all like family on this show.”

“That’s disgusting, putrid bullshit and you know it. Save it for the sound bites. You don’t care at all. Admit it, at least.”

Quentin Dole, as was his custom and his instinct when cornered, did not argue but sought to slip away along a different path. “Jake,” he said, “can we please be a little professional here? We’ve got ten weeks to do a book. We can’t afford to get all emotional and go on strike every time there’s a little hiccup.”

“A little hiccup? A member of your
family
gets chopped up by a speedboat and to you this is a little hiccup? That’s fucked. That’s really fucked.”

He held the phone away as if it carried a disease and pushed the little red button. Pushing the little red button did not quite have the cathartic power of slamming down a receiver, but still, it was emphatic enough that Jake’s hand trembled just a bit. He waded to the edge of the pool and slid the phone along the tiles. Then he submerged. Just sat down at the bottom to hide out for a moment.

When he surfaced Bryce was standing nearby. He said, “Well, I guess you told him.”

Jake blinked chlorine from his eyes and glanced up at the sky. Gulls were wheeling, a squad of pelicans was scudding by. Sure enough, things were starting to look a little different here. What mattered, what didn’t. What was bullshit, what was real. Suddenly pleased with himself, Jake said, “Yeah, I guess I did.” And he slipped back underwater for a while.

13.

Some minutes later, while he was drying off in caressing sunshine, Jake got another call. It was Claire Segal.

Seeming to savor the whole idea, she said, “I heard you just hung up on Quentin.”

“He tells you everything?”

“Not hardly. He doesn’t tell anybody everything. Did it feel good?”

“Hanging up? Yeah, it did.”

“I’m envious. Anyway, he asked me to call to apologize.”

Jake wasn’t sure he’d heard right. Maybe he still had water in his ear. “Wait a second. I hung up on him. And he’s the one apologizing?”

“That’s right.”

Disarmed, Jake fumbled for a moment then said, “Well, that’s nice of him.”

“No it isn’t.”

“It isn’t?”

“It’s pragmatic. Classic Quentin. He can’t afford to piss you off.”

“Still, to apologize —”

“What? It costs him nothing. He has no pride. No, that’s not exactly right. He prides himself on getting what he needs from people. Doesn’t matter how. Charm, threats, tantrums, apologies. He makes himself big or makes himself little. Whatever gets him where he needs to go.”

Jake said, “I think you’ve just described a textbook sociopath.”

“Maybe. But why stick a label on it? He’s a successful producer. He’s obsessed and he needs to be obsessed. Nothing really exists for him except the show. Not me, not you, not Donna. It may not be pretty, but there it is.”

Jake draped a towel over his head and thought it over. “Okay, I get it. Sort of. Tell him I accept his apology. But I still think he’s an insensitive dick.”

Claire laughed. “I’ll tell him. He won’t care. But he won’t forget either. When he doesn’t need you anymore, look out. But another thing. We’re not shooting tomorrow. Everybody’s too upset.”

“My, how human.”

“Come on, don’t judge us all by Quentin. I’m wondering if you might like to have lunch with me.”

Caught off guard, Jake hesitated.

“Don’t get all hot and bothered,” she said. “It’s just an innocent invitation for some seafood and a chat. I’m surrounded by kids here, chronological and emotional. I get a little starved for grown-up company. Can we say Louie’s Backyard, one o’clock?”

---

At another fancy marina, this one at the north end of Key Largo, another fancy speedboat was being carefully tied into its berth. This craft was a sort of mica black flecked with metallic glints of forest green and midnight blue. Its dark windshield, now washed clean of spray, was molded and raked back like that of an Indy car. Roped off like a captured beast, the swelling hull still seemed to be straining forward, itching to climb the water as though it were a mountainside.

A man stepped off the boat. There was nothing remotely thuggish about him and in fact he was a very handsome man who looked considerably younger than his sixty or so years. His face and neck were beautifully tanned, just slightly leathery but in a way that flattered his flinty eyes. He wore pleated khaki shorts that ended just above his well-toned knees and a tidy polo shirt with a prestigious logo on the chest. His leather-laced boat shoes were the classic brand, and his salt-and-pepper hair was neither too short nor too long. There was a certain archaic elegance in the style of it; it lay in perfect waves, each a finger’s breadth from the next, the way that 1940s crooners used to wear their hair.

The man walked up the dock, said cordial hellos to fellow boaters who were oiling teak or polishing brass or fiddling with balky engines. These other people called him Johnny and seemed proud he’d noticed them, glad of his attention. He continued on through the marina gate and toward a waterside restaurant called Handsome Johnny’s Crab Joint. It was the tail end of lunchtime but the terrace tables were still full. He looked with an uneasy mix of satisfaction and contempt at the tourists in their lobster bibs, clumsily wielding picks and crackers, then he smoothly slipped into his purported place of business and disappeared from sight.

14.

Joey Goldman had grown up in a tenement in Queens. His wife, Sandra Dugan, had lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn. Their home in Key West was therefore the fulfillment of a fantasy held by cramped apartment dwellers everywhere. It was mostly open space and windows. Glass doors slid aside to welcome in a safe and mild world. Skylights tracked the weather and the progress of the sun and moon. You stepped into that house and you felt sheltered but not trapped. There were plenty of ways to get out again.

Their backyard felt bigger than it really was. The shimmer from the pool somehow seemed to stretch the space above it. Patches of color — soft blue skyflower, flame red nicotiana — coaxed the eye from place to place. Small groupings of furniture created a cozy array of places to sit.

In one of those groupings, poolside, an old man was reclining with a chihuahua on his lap. The man had white hair, still quite thick, tinged with yellow at the upturning edges. He had black eyes set well back in their sockets and an enormous but stately nose that shaded one side of his face as if it were a sundial. He wore a resplendent linen shirt, lavender with navy piping on the placket and around the pockets; the same color had been used for his monogram, B d’A, done in fancy script. His long bony fingers encircled the little dog, sometimes petting it, other times just holding on.

He was scratching it behind the ears when Joey, who’d sprung up to answer the doorbell, came back into the yard with a fresh bottle of Chianti in his hand and their other dinner guest at his side. “Bert,” he said, “meet Jake Benson. Jake, meet my oldest friend down here, Bert d’Ambrosia. First guy I met. Then it turned out he knew my father, my mother, my whole family from New York. Small world, right?”

Bert extended a veiny hand and said, “’Scuse me if I don’t get up. Takes a while. Plus I got the stupid dog. This here’s Don Giovanni. Say hello, Giovanni.”

The dog allowed the old man to lift and wave its tiny paw. Then it licked the flat and reddish place where once upon a time its balls had been.

Joey sat, poured wine all around, and said to Jake, “I was just telling Bert about this craziness with Donna and the boat. Wanted to see what he made of it.”

Bert ate an olive then dabbed his full lips on a napkin. “What’s to make? It’s a big fuckin’ ocean out there. You got one broad swimmin’ innee the ocean. You got one boat ridin’ onnee ocean. They end up in the exact same spot at the exact same time. Coincidence?”

“It’s a stretch,” said Joey. “But it’s tough to see —”

“What? A motive? Crazy fuckin’ world, who needs a motive anymore? People feel like runnin’ someone over, they do it. Wha’d you say this girl’s last name is?”

“Alvarez.”

“From Miami, right? Cuban probably. They got their issues. The Castro bullshit. The smuggling bullshit.” To Jake he said, “You know this Donna person?”

“Just met last night. Strange circumstance. I was drunk. She was naked.”

“Match made in heaven,” the old man said.

“Nothing happened. We talked.”

Bert sipped some wine, then, as was becoming an ever more frequent occurrence, his mind skipped back to what he’d been saying before. “Yeah, the Cubans, they have their little wars, their little squabbles with certain people I used to know. Plus, from what you said about the boat--Cigarette or something close, right?”

“Big, fast, and dark,” Jake put in.

“Ya see, that tells me something. That’s not a boat that citizens take for a spin on a weekday morning. That’s a working boat, if you catch my drift.” He’d put his hands back on the dog. Now he turned his big face down and spoke to it. “You and me, we’ve took some rides on boats like that, ain’t we, Giovanni.”

The dog flicked out a quick pink tongue and kissed the old man on the tip of his giant nose.

Jake drank some wine and hid behind his glass a moment. He needed some time to gather his thoughts. He knew it was improbable, ridiculous, but he couldn’t help thinking that Joey’s best friend Bert looked more than a little bit like an old Mafioso. He talked more than a little bit like an old Mafioso. And he brought out more of an Outer Borough accent in Joey than Jake had noticed before; a hint of social club accent almost. Then again, Jake’s imagination tended to run away with him; professional hazard, after all. But he couldn’t help mulling the possibility, and Bert d’Ambrosia somehow seemed to sense him mulling it. When Jake lowered the wineglass from his face, the two men shared a fleeting but entirely candid glance.

Jake’s eyes asked: Are you?

Bert’s twinkling gaze and merest hint of a sly smile said: Yeah, what of it?

Jake briefly wondered why he wasn’t more uneasy or surprised, why this latest wrinkle simply struck him as one more thing that might happen in Key West. Was it just the heat? The haze of humidity that blurred sharp edges and usual assumptions? He held Bert’s stare a heartbeat longer, until Sandra appeared in the open doorway and called over to Joey. “Can you give me a hand in here? I’m cooking on four burners.”

---

Inside the airy kitchen, water was heating for pasta. Spinach was sautéing. Garlic was slowly toasting and tomatoes were cooking down, farting out a viscous bubble now and then. Joey picked up a wooden spoon and started stirring.

“How’s Bert tonight?” asked Sandra, brushing back a wisp of caramel-colored hair from her forehead. Just past forty, Sandra didn’t look her age and never had. Twenty years in the Keys and her skin was still smooth and unfreckled.

Just slightly defensively, Joey said, “He’s fine. Sharp as a tack.”

“He still calling the dog by the wrong name?”

“Sandra, what does it matter what he calls the dog?”

“It worries me, that’s all.”

It worried Joey too but he fought against admitting it. “You think the dog cares what he calls it? Six months ago dog was on death row, one bowl of kibble from the gas chamber. He’s happy to be called anything. Plus he had a stupid name before. Nacho. That’s like, whaddyacallit, racial profiling. Mexican dog, name him after an appetizer. That’s not right.”

Sandra said, “I’m not talking about the dog’s ethnic background, okay? I’m talking about Bert. I sometimes worry he’s not so with it anymore. That he’s living in the past.”

Reluctantly, Joey said, “On this one thing, maybe. Other than that, he’s sharp, he’s fine.”

Sandra said nothing. Joey stirred tomatoes. Agitated, he stirred them a little too hard so that hot red starbursts shot over the edges of the pan. After a moment he went on, “Come on, Sandra, guy’s almost ninety, he’s entitled to a little … a little, let’s call it eccentricity.”

His wife just leaned over and kissed him softly on the cheek.