KW 09:Shot on Location (8 page)

18.

At Florida Keys General if not on national TV, Donna Alvarez was already an established star.

She’d amazed the doctors with her resilience, her vigor and her will. Mere hours after sustaining her gruesome injuries, she’d been moved out of the ICU, unhooked from the now unneeded monitors that tracked her rock-solid vital signs. By the next morning, she’d been half-propped up in bed and was sipping lukewarm broth through a straw. By afternoon, weaned down to a modest regimen of Vicodin, she was more or less alert and chatting with the nurses. Not that she didn’t bear evidence of what she’d been through. On her right side, a bulge in her pale green hospital gown traced out the place where a wound was heavily bandaged over a zigzag pattern of stitches. Her right arm was lifted at an awkward angle, the dislocated shoulder immobilized by a kind of heavy-duty bubble wrap, the hand taped to a trapeze on a frame.

When Claire and Jake, bearing flowers and chocolates, were shown into her room, her eyes, just slightly veiled with the merciful haze of painkillers, were riveted to a gossip show on television.

Candace McBride was on the screen, talking earnestly about “the near-tragedy on the set of
Adrift.
” Asked if she thought the guilty speedboat might in fact have been stalking her, the diva put a tremble in her lower lip and looked away. Asked if she had enemies, she was all bewilderment and hurt feelings. “I get along with people. I love people. But fans of the show are so passionate, so involved. Maybe they don’t realize where the character ends and the real me begins.”

With her good hand Donna switched off the set. Before she even said hello to her visitors, she said in a voice slightly thickened by her meds, “Can you believe it? I’m lying here with my arm stuck out like I’m saluting Hitler, my side feels like a half-chewed burger, and that cunt still thinks it’s all about her.”

Claire said, “Donna, Donna, so glad to see they haven’t broken your spirit.”

“They’ve broken every other fucking thing.” Then, to Jake, she said, “Hello, handsome. Thanks for the lift.” Her slightly blurry eyes flicking back to Claire, she went on. “How’s the shooting going? Hope I haven’t messed up the schedule.”

“Actually, you have. Big time. No one’s working today. Everybody’s too upset.”

“Upset. Why? Because maybe it was supposed to be Candace lying here?”

“No. Upset about you. Everyone was really worried.”

At this expression of some basic kindness, Donna’s bravado finally let go. Her face softened, she squirmed in bed and couldn’t quite suppress a wince of pain from her wound. Quietly she said, “It’s really nice you came to see me.” Her gaze drifted toward the fancily wrapped box that Jake was holding in his hand. “Looks like chocolates. What kind?”

Jake had no idea. He’d rushed into a shop and grabbed some. “Um, assorted.”

“Expensive?”

“Very.”

“Good. I like expensive chocolates. It’s really nice you came to see me. Did I say that already?”

Claire and Jake shared a quick glance. Claire said, “You must be tired. We’ll come back another time soon.”

“No!” said Donna. There was a hint of pleading in it. “Stay. I’m fine. Just a little groggy. My energy sort of comes and goes. It’s so nice that you came. Sit down. Sit down.”

They pulled over squeaky metal chairs and sat down at the bedside. The smells of the hospital wafted over them — plasma, disinfectant, overcooked vegetables on lunch trays.

Donna gestured weakly toward the blank TV. “This bullshit with Candace. Is that what people really think?”

Claire said, “People, like, the public? Who knows what they think? It’s just something Quentin and the publicist cooked up for the media.”

Donna gave as much of a one-sided shrug as she could manage. “Figured it was something like that. Makes sense. Better story.”

“Are you sure of that?” Jake asked.

Donna’s fragile focus seemed to wander. “Sure of what?”

“That the made-up version is a better story. Maybe what really happened is a better story.”

Donna said nothing.

Jake went on. “What do you think really happened?”

Donna came close to a small, hoarse laugh. “I think I got run over by a fucking boat.”

“Just like that? By accident?”

The stuntwoman let her eyes fall closed. She kept them shut for long enough that her visitors had time to wonder if she had drifted off to sleep. Then she opened them again and said, “I hope so. I hope it was an accident.”

“But you’re not sure,” Jake pressed.

She turned her head and shifted her legs beneath the sheet, trying to wriggle up taller in the bed. The effort cost her pain. Through a grimace she said, “How could I be sure?”

She zoned out for another few seconds then licked her dry lips and added very softly, “Someone took my script.”

“Your script?” said Claire.

Donna, fighting against a humiliating fatigue, kept squirming, trying to sit up higher, “I couldn’t find it that morning. Yesterday morning. I looked everywhere.”

Claire said gently, “It’ll turn up.”

“No it won’t,” said Donna with a kind of muted certainty. “I’ve never lost a script. I never would. Someone took it.” She tried to pivot onto her good elbow and flinched. “Why would someone take my script?”

A nurse walked into the room just then. He found his star patient half-leaning out of bed, clearly drained and agitated. He quickly moved over to soothe her then politely but firmly he shooed the visitors away.

When Jake and Claire were nearly out the door, Donna managed to lean over to see beyond the nurse’s body. “Come back tomorrow. Please. I’ll be all better by tomorrow.”

Jake promised that he would.

Donna said, “Bring more chocolates.”

19.

Back at the compound, Jake walked around the pool and beyond the pumps and filters to the shed where Bryce lived. He found the door wide open, sagging on corroded hinges. The slender young man in the red sarong was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.

“Hi, Bryce. Got a minute?”

“No. I’m busy.”

“Oh.”

“Just kidding. What’s up?” He came to a half-recumbent position, leaning on his elbows.

“Got a question for you. The other day, when Donna’s old boyfriend —”

“Ace, his name is.”

“Okay, when Ace was here. Tell me more about what happened.”

“Why?”

“I’m just interested, that’s all.”

“Why you want to know? You playing detective or something?”

Jake said nothing.

“Might be kind of cool if you decided to play detective.”

Jake stayed quiet and after a moment Bryce went on.

“Isn’t much to tell. He barged into the compound, headed to Donna’s place. I told him he shouldn’t go in. He went in anyway.”

“He had a key?”

“He said he did. I think he was bluffing. Donna had the lock changed when she threw him out. He sort of blocked the view with his body. Took him a little longer to open the door than it would have with a key. Not much longer. Everyone has shitty locks down here.”

“And he took something, right? I heard you say he was taking something that wasn’t his.”

“Yeah, a notebook. That old three-ring kind, like in school.”

“Her script?”

Bryce shrugged, his thin shoulders reaching almost to his earlobes. “I guess. I used to see her sitting with that notebook, sort of mouthing her lines.”

Jake said, “She has no lines. She just does stunts.”

“Mouthing other people’s lines, then. You know, pretending like she was a star, I guess.”

The observation depressed Jake. He looked down at his feet then at the wall behind Bryce’s bed. That’s when he noticed that the wall was totally plastered in carefully tacked up pages from illustrated calendars. The pages seemed at first to suggest a preoccupation, maybe even an obsession, with the clipped and steady drumbeat of time. But then he realized that the months were hung in no particular order and had been lifted out of different years. This splatter of chronology, more in keeping with a long dream than with waking life, intrigued him. Was it a sort of uncaptioned scrapbook of special moments or did Bryce just like the peculiar array of photographs — the Eiffel Tower, Whitney Houston, baby kangaroos — that were appended to the random months?

After a silence, he said, “What’s with the calendars?”

“What about them?”

“They’re not in any order.”

Bryce quietly disagreed. “They’re in an order. Just not the usual one.”

He said this with such serene finality that Jake thought it would be rude to press the matter further. He thanked Bryce for his time and turned to go.

To his back Bryce said, “Hey, I have a kind of cool idea. If you’re really going to play detective, maybe I could be your helper. Any chance?”

---

Poolside at The Nest, a tall, lean blonde in amber sunglasses and a yellow thong bikini was stashing her gladiator sandals beneath her lounge and preparing to rub suntan lotion on her feet and legs. This rubbing turned out to be a slow and languorous process; in fact it bordered on the lewd. She caressed her insteps then massaged each facet of her shapely ankles. Her calves she anointed with long firm strokes that traced out filaments of muscle and painted a moist lubricated sheen onto her skin. She cupped her knees to baste them, then pampered her thighs, inside and out, high up toward her loins, the taut flesh quivering just slightly as her hands passed slowly over. She twisted on her hips, oiling first one buttock then the other, giving the merest suggestion of a brisk spank along with the caress.

There was one thing that was very clear about this little ritual. It wasn’t just about sun protection. The woman wanted to be looked at. And she was. Straight men looked at her with barely disguised Pavlovian appetite. Gay men studied and admired the bitch-goddess aloofness. Women looked at the bold display with silent disapproval, mingled, perhaps, with just a touch of secret envy of her brazen confidence.

But if the woman wanted to be looked at, she didn’t quite want to be seen. She returned none of the glances thrown her way. She lay back on her lounge, picked up a magazine, and largely disappeared behind it, her eyes emerging only briefly when some new person appeared at the edges of her vision. Furtively, she glanced at each new passerby but lost interest in less than a heartbeat.

She was still lying there when Claire returned from the hospital and was walking through the pool area to her room. The woman peeked quickly over the top of her magazine and was already lowering it again when Claire said a brief but friendly hello. The woman lifted her face just long enough to answer in kind and in that moment Claire thought she looked somehow familiar. “Do I know you?” she asked.

“No. I’m sure you don’t.”

The denial required only an instant of shared gaze, but in that tiny interval Claire’s impression deepened. She couldn’t quite put her finger on why. It wasn’t the surface details of the face, exactly; more to do with the structure of it — the placement of the eyes, the slope of the jawline, the angle of the ears. “From Los Angeles, maybe?”

“No. I’m sorry. Never been there.”

“My mistake,” said Claire with an apologetic little smile.

The woman didn’t answer and didn’t smile back, simply raised the magazine again to shade her face and shoulders while her legs gleamed like washed bronze in the sunshine.

20.

In his spacious office that was well insulated against the heat and tumult of the kitchen, surrounded by signed photos of celebrities who’d eaten in his restaurant, Handsome Johnny Burke was talking on his cell phone. His feet were up on his desk and he leaned far back in a chair that could swivel every which way. His voice was animated, his gestures were expansive. He asked lots of questions, as though he was catching up with a long lost friend. “So it’s going well?” he said avidly. “Going like you hoped it would?”

“Even better,” said the voice at the other end of the line. “Three hundred thousand hits on the website, today alone. The publicist is on a tear. Everybody’s talking.”

“And the actress? She’s doing her part?”

“Shamelessly.”

“Shameless in Hollywood is good,” said Handsome Johnny. “Even I learned that. And I didn’t learn too damn much.”

In this Johnny was being modest. When, some forty-something years before, he’d moved from Baltimore to Los Angeles with nothing but his good looks and his vague but fierce ambition to break into the movies, he’d learned plenty. He’d learned, for instance, that it wasn’t only starlets who paid their dues on the casting couch. It was the ’70s; things were weird, many varieties of sex and drugs around, and Johnny Burke did what he thought he needed to do. The payback, though, never seemed to be a role, only an audition that didn’t quite pan out, a screen test that didn’t go so well. Broke, lacking prospects, he soon figured out that supplying drugs was a better deal than using them himself. This, in turn, led him downward toward the stratum of small-time punks and wannabe gangsters who loitered at the edges of the entertainment business, stealing cars occasionally, running contraband from Tijuana. At moments Johnny Burke blamed Hollywood for turning him bad; at other moments he perversely reveled in the acknowledgment that he’d always been a lousy person just waiting to happen. Still, it had genuinely surprised him to realize he’d become a criminal.

Now the voice at the other end of the phone pinched down into an uncomfortable laugh and said, “You learned enough to get out.”

Something in the simple words seemed to sting Johnny Burke. His shoulders sagged, his voice lost some of its ebullience. “Yeah, I did. With plenty of regrets. I did.”

But what did he have to regret? His ambition to be an actor had been mocked and tarnished beyond recognition; nothing left to mourn on that score. There was certainly no nostalgia in moving on from his dirtbag Los Angeles companions. The only thing worth regretting was that a few months before he bolted town, Johnny had gotten someone pregnant. She was a casual girlfriend, no great love, but she was determined to have the baby. To Johnny this was utterly unthinkable. His attitude was not entirely selfish. He didn’t want to subject a child to a father like him in a world like the one he knew. He denied paternity and headed to Florida.

“We don’t need to talk about regrets,” the phone voice said. “We’ve been all through that.”

“I still feel it, Quentin. What can I say?”

“You don’t need to say anything, Dad.”

Handsome Johnny pulled his feet down from the desk, rocked forward in his chair, and leaned on his elbows, one hand raking through the waves in his hair. “It must be hard for you to say that word.”

“It is. The truth? I say it, it’s like I’m choking on a piece of steak. And in another way it feels good. All fucked up, I guess.”

“I’m sorry, Quentin.”

“Stop that. It’s all fine now. For both of us.”

Johnny gave a secret wince at that. Things with him were fine only if you didn’t look too closely. He owned a restaurant. Through his old West Coat connections he helped to finance movies. Lately he’d even been tracked down and reached out to by the highly successful son he’d given up on ever knowing. It might have passed for a happy ending to a sordid story but none of it was what it seemed. The restaurant was his in name alone; in fact it was a money laundering machine for a Miami mobster. The movie financing also came from dirty money and was little more than loan-sharking by a more prestigious name.

And this sudden contact with the son, this parody of family — if it was the sweetest thing in Johnny’s life, it was also in some way the creepiest. As a father he’d been a runaway and a deadbeat. What could he offer his grown son now except a tardy and rather mawkish love marbled with a guilt that did no one any good? And why should the son feel anything other than rage and loathing toward the parent who’d bolted on him? In their conversations he pretended to something almost like natural affection, but below the surface of their cordiality there was blaming, and also a kind of horrid symmetry. Handsome Johnny, knowing all the while that nothing could make up for his long ago abandonment, would do anything for Quentin. Quentin, without a qualm and in fact with a certain vengeful relish, would ask anything of Johnny. Their relationship was a conspiracy of futile amends and futile getting even.

Trying to rally from his suddenly dark mood, Johnny Burke said, “I’m pulling for you, kid. I’ll do anything to make it up. You know that, right?”

“I do,” said Quentin Dole.

“Okay. Call me when the ratings come in. The second you see the numbers. Call me. Okay?”

The producer of
Adrift
promised that he would.