Lullaby Town (1992) (3 page)

Peter didn't look at him. "Bonnie?"

"Yeah, Pete-man?"

Peter spit a chewed MM at him. It hit Bonnie's right pants leg, hung there a second, then fell. It left a green smear. "Hit the road."

Pat Kyle made a hissing sound. Bonnie's face went white and his body stiffened as if the MM had been a turd pie, and for just a moment, his face was clenched and hard and angry. Then, a little bit at a time, the anger was stored away as if little men inside of Bonnie were disassembling it block by block. When enough of the blocks were gone, the little men built a smile. It wasn't a very good smile, but the little men were probably tired from all the overtime they put in. Bonnie said, "Sure, Pete-man. Whatever you say. I'll call later. Hey, I'm really sorry you got stuck with those TV clips." His voice was tight. Trainee in the voice-box crew, no doubt.

Donnie Brewster turned and walked out without looking at me or at Pat Kyle or at Nick or T. J. or Dani. Peter poured the rest of the MMs into his mouth, crumpled the wrapper, then laid a hook shot toward a square wastebasket and missed. Dani picked it up.

The Nickster made a whiny voice. "Sure, Pete-man, whatever you say."

Peter and T. J. and the Nickster laughed. Dani didn't.

I looked at Pat Kyle. Her eyes were hard and her jaw was tight and she was staring at the floor. What, and give up show business? I looked back at Peter Alan Nelsen. Nick and T. J. were rolling around on the zebra couch, laughing and goosing each other and slapping hands. I said, "Peter. I didn't come here for Pee-Wee's playhouse."

The laughter stopped.

"I have come because my friend Pat Kyle asked me to come, and I have answered questions about myself because that's the way most people beat around the bush before they get down to business, but now we are at the end of the road. Unless you knock off the bullshit and get to the point, I will walk out of here and you can get someone else to do the job."

Peter Alan Nelsen blinked at me through surprised, little-boy eyes. T. J. got up from the couch and put his hands on his hips and grinned at me. The Nickster said, "Oh, man, Peter, this guy wants a piece."

Dani uncrossed the big arms and came forward until her right hip was pressed against the desk, very close to Peter. Her left quadricep flexed like a beating heart. Peter stared at me for a long time, sort of smiling, but mostly looking like a litde boy who'd been caught eating worms and knew it was wrong. He looked ashamed. Peter said, "Nick, T. J., you guys go grab a beer or something, okay?"

Nick and T. J. glanced at Peter, then walked out, the Nickster making a big deal out of coming very close to me. When they were gone, Peter slid off the desk, dug out his wallet, took out a small color snapshot, and handed it to me. It was creased cleanly once, and yellowed the way old photos are yellowed when they have lain untouched between papers in a box for many years. It was Peter. Much younger and even thinner, with long frizzy hair and a dark maroon T-shirt that said USC FILM. He was sitting on an ugly cloth couch in a plain student's apartment and he was holding a tiny baby. Neither Peter nor the baby looked happy. He said, "I've got an ex-wife and a son. The last time I saw my son, he was maybe a year old. His name is Toby. We named him Toby after Toby Tyler, or, Ten Weeks with the Circus. He's gotta be about twelve now, but I don't know if he's dead or if he's alive or if he's a crip in a ward somewhere. I don't know if he likes pizza. I don't know if he likes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You see?"

I nodded. "Your ex-wife never came to you for child support?"

"No."

"Or alimony?"

He spread his hands. "For all I know she's on the moon."

I said, "Peter, you ever think maybe the woman doesn't want to be found?"

He stared at me.

"It's been ten years and you don't exactly lead a low-profile life. If she wanted to find you, she could've. I've done jobs like this before, and what happens is that everyone ends up wishing well enough had been left alone. The kids end up confused and scared and the parents end up fighting the old fights. You see?"

Peter took a deep breath and shook his head and looked around the office. With TJ. and the Nickster and Donnie Brewster gone, the office felt empty and he looked alone. He said, "I'm worth, what? Maybe two hundred million, something like that? If I've got a kid, part of that's his, right?" Trying to convince me. "What if he needs a car? What if he can't afford college?"

I said, "You want to be a father."

He took back the snapshot of the very much younger Peter Alan Nelsen and his baby son. Toby. Toby Tyler and the circus. "Unless the kid's dead, I'm a father whether I want to be or not That oughta mean something, right?"

I said, "Yes. It should."

"So Karen's mad. So I schmucked out back then and I blew it. Does that mean that I have to pay for it the rest of my life?"

"No."

He shook his head and went over behind the marble desk and sat down the way a very old man would sit and he looked at the little picture again. He said, "You know what's weird? It's like there's a piece of me out there that I don't know and have never seen. It's like I can feel him, like there's this other self, you see?"

I nodded. "The boy may not feel that way. Your ex-wife almost certainly won't."

He got up and walked over to the pinball machine and then to the video game and then to the Wurlitzer. He would stand, then move, then stand again, as if he didn't quite know what to do with himself or where he should be or how to say what he wanted to say.

I said, "Just say it."

He turned and his face seemed faraway and lost and hurt. "I just want to say hello to my kid."

I nodded. "I don't blame you," I said. "I'll help you find him."

The world's third most successful director took a deep breath, then said, "Good. Good." He came across the room and shook my hand. "Good."

The black secretary stuck his head in the door and told Peter that someone named Langston needed to see him on the stage right away.

We trooped down out of his office and back into the real world of aliens and oil barons and people who looked suspiciously like studio executives. Patricia Kyle and Peter Alan Nelsen and I walked together, with Dani sort of drifting behind. Somewhere between Peter's office and the soundstage, Nick and TJ. reappeared, Nick giving me tough whenever I looked at him. Had me shaking, that guy. Make you turn in your license, a guy like that. I looked at Peter Alan Nelsen, instead. "What was your ex-wife's name?"

"Karen Nelsen."

"Not her married name. What was her maiden name?"

"Karen Shipley. That cop we talked to, Ito, he said you're big with the martial arts. He said you took out some killer from Japan."

I said, "What's your son's name?"

"Toby Samuel Nelsen. I got the Sam from Sam Fuller. Great director. You ever been shot?"

"I caught some frag once."

"What did it feel like?"

"Peter, let's stick to the information about your ex-wife, okay?"

"Yeah, sure. What do you want to know?"

We walked along the little studio back streets and people stopped what they were doing and looked at him. They saw celebrities every day, so they wouldn't look at Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford or Jane Fonda, but they looked at Peter Alan Nelsen, and Peter seemed to enjoy it. He stood tall and when he spoke he made broad, exaggerated gestures as if what was happening had been scripted and he was acting the scene and the lookers were his audience. Maybe the lookers thought so, too. Maybe, since Peter was the King of Adventure, they figured that a Stearman biplane would suddenly appear and begin a strafing run. Maybe they thought a Lamborghini Contach driven by Daryl Hannah would suddenly screech around the corner, chased by psychopaths in souped-up Fords, and Peter would have to save the day and it would really be something to see. If Daryl Hannah was driving the Contach, Peter would have to move pretty fast. I was planning to get there first.

I said, "Okay. Do you have any idea where Karen might be living?"

"No."

"You think she's still here in Los Angeles?"

"I don't know."

"Did she ever talk about someplace in particular, like, 'I'd really like to live in Palmdale one day,' or, 'Los Angeles is the greatest city in the world. I'll never leave it,' something like that?"

"I never thought about living anyplace else."

"Not you. Her."

"I don't know."

"Did she have any friends?"

He pressed his lips together and made a shrug. "Yeah. I guess so." Thinking harder. Then, "I dunno. I was sort of into my own thing." Embarrassed that he didn't have an answer.

I looked at Pat Kyle.

Pat said, "Where was she born, Peter?"

"Someplace in Arizona or New Mexico. Phoenix, maybe." He frowned. "We never talked about stuff like that."

"Okay."

"Why don't you ask me something I know?"

"Okay. What do you know?"

He thought for a while. "About Karen?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know."

I said, "How did you meet? Did she belong to any clubs or organizations? Did she have brothers or sisters or aunts or uncles or cousins or grandparents?" I figured if I listed enough stuff I would get lucky somewhere.

He said, "I've got an older sister. She's married to a fat guy lives in Cleveland." Everything was /.

"Great. But that's about you. What about Karen?"

"Oh." Oh. Then, "I think she was an only child. I think her people were dead."

"But you don't know."

"They were dead." We walked along a little more, thinking about it. He said, "Maybe she was from Colorado."

We went through a pair of twenty-six-foot doors and into a battleship-gray soundstage that was being rebuilt to resemble the interior of a Mayan ziggurat. The doors were open to let in the air and the light. Above and around us dozens of men and women in shorts and T-shirts clung like spiders to scaffolding as they attached vacu-formed plastic panels to a wooden frame. The panels had been cast to look like great stone blocks. There were the sounds of hammers and saws and screwguns and the smell of plastic cement and paint, and somewhere a woman laughed. It was warming as the day wore on, and some of the men had their shirts off.

A heavy man with a Vandyke beard and a roll of architectural plans noticed Peter and started toward us. Peter frowned and said, "Nick, T. J., gimme some space here, huh?"

Nick gestured toward the beard and TJ. went over and intercepted him. Blocking backs.

We turned left past a couple of guys building something that looked like a sacrificial altar and squeezed between two backdrop flats and over a tangle of electrical cables into a little clearing that had been set up as a sort of office with a desk and a phone and a coffee machine. There was another Webcor candy machine next to the desk. Peter slammed it with his elbow and a PayDay candy bar dropped out. Dani said, "Peter has a candy machine like this on all of his sets. It's part of his contract." She said it like a press release.

Peter said, "Go find Langston, willya, Dani? Tell'm we're hiding back here and ready to rock."

Dani squeezed back between the flats and disappeared into the darkness. Nick hung back behind the flats, still not liking me.

Peter said, "Man, I can't take a shit, the pogues aren't after me about something. That's why we gotta hide." He tore the wrapper off the candy, stuffed most of the bar into his mouth, and dropped the wrapper onto the floor. I wondered how often he brushed.

I said, "Tell me how you met."

"I was at USC when I met her. I was casting a film and put up flyers for actors and Karen called for a reading. It was a ripoff of those biker flicks in the sixties. Eighteen minutes, synced sound, black and white. You wanna see it?"

"Is Karen in it?"

"No. I didn't give her the part."

"Then I don't need to see it."

"I made an audition tape for her. I couldn't find it, but I got the outtake tape. It was a long time ago, so it's Beta format, but I brought it into the office. We can probably dig out a machine if you wanna see. I did a pretty good job with her." More of the fs. I met. 7 married. / lived. Maybe Karen Shipley wasn't real. Maybe, like Pinocchio, she was a wooden puppet he had brought to life.

"What's an audition tape?"

Pat said, "It's a way for an actor to introduce herself to casting agents. The actor tells you about herself and maybe reads a scene. Peter would've shot a lot more tape than Karen would need, then edited it down to three or four minutes. The outtake tape will be the takes they didn't use in the final product."

Peter nodded and said something, but his mouth was full of candy again, and I didn't understand what he said.

I said, "I'll want to look at it. Do you have a still picture?"

He swallowed the wad of chocolate and peanuts and shook his head.

Pat Kyle opened her briefcase and handed me a black-and-white 8 X 10 head shot of a pretty young woman with dark hair and eyes that would be either green or hazel. "I phoned a friend at SAG and he came up with this." The woman in the photograph was made up as a waitress with a fluffy apron and cap and a bright the-lemon-pie-is-very-nice-today! smile. She didn't look convincing. KAREN SHIPLEY was spelled out in block letters along a white border at the bottom of the picture.