Trophy Widow (18 page)

“Let's go back to my office,” he said. “We can talk there.”

His office was up a flight of stairs above the reception area—the only part of the building above floor level. As I reached the top of the stairs I could look out over the entire studio. There were three other soundstages in addition to the bedroom set—a living room set, a bathroom set (with a large tub and a glass-enclosed shower), and an office set (desk, couch, etc.). Beyond the sets were storage areas and production areas and equipment areas. I saw a forklift moving slowly between two rows of boxes on pallets.

Harry Silver's office was as much a surprise as he was. I'd expected a framed gallery of autographed bimbo shots on the walls and a few cheesy porno awards on a bookcase. Instead, the only items on the walls were his diplomas (Williams College, B.A. cum laude; Brown University, M.A., Ph.D.), a Las Vegas wedding photograph (he in a black tuxedo, Jillian in a white wedding gown), and a large abstract painting in a style that looked vaguely familiar. As for the bookcase, it actually contained books. The bottom two rows had what appeared to be a complete set of the works of Anthony Trollope, while the top row had a three-volume set of the plays of William Shakespeare and a variety of books on film and film criticism.

“You're a Trollope fan?” I asked.

“I wrote my doctoral thesis on him. Have you read his works?”

“Just the Barchester novels.”

“Superb stuff. The man is grossly underrated. Compared to him, Dickens's novels are comic books. He's every bit the equal of George Eliot. I taught a graduate seminar on him.”

“Where?”

“Washington University.”

A pause. “You were a professor?”

He grinned. “Hard to believe, eh? Yes, for five years. Assistant professor, actually. Important distinction there.” He chuckled. “In this business, the heft of your penis is important. In academia, it's the heft of your title. For the first three years I taught nineteenth-century English literature. The last two years I taught mostly film studies.”

“Why'd you leave?” I asked.

He gave me a mischievous look. “Because the chairman of the department asked me to leave. His problems with me began on a personal level. I believe he took exception to the fact that I was fucking his wife on a regular basis. Although he hadn't fucked her in months, he nevertheless had a distinctly nineteenth-century proprietary view of her body. This personal problem between us purportedly escalated to departmental concerns when he learned that I was also fucking one of his students. Not one of my own, mind you. Despite appearances, I do have some scruples. Or at least I did back then. In any event, the object of my desire was one of
his
students, not mine. Indeed, she was a lovely poetry major that he had been attempting in vain to bang for two semesters. I suppose I could have fought him, but after five years in that political cesspool I was ready for a change. You say you've read Trollope.” He gave me an approving smile. “You must be a reader.”

“I am”

“A passionate one?”

“Actually, yes.”

He nodded. “I became an English professor because I loved to read and wanted to convey that love to others.” He shook his head ruefully. “How naïve. The love of reading is beside the point in a modern English department. I certainly didn't earn my degree to enlist as a foot soldier in Jacques Derrida's poststructuralist/postmodernist deconstructionist brigade. So I finally said fuck it. I tried film criticism for about a year, but there's no money in that, and most of the films I love date back several decades. Newspaper readers want a review of this year's version of
Pretty Woman
, not an essay on the use of irony in
The Philadelphia Story
. So I decided to quit writing about the latest chick-flick and started making my own versions. I tried the independent film route. That's a one-way ticket to oblivion. Fade out. Cut to interior—Pinnacle Productions.” He gestured grandly. “And here I am: the Prince of Porn.”

Despite my opinion of his industry, I was charmed.

“Ironically,” he said, “I'm far more mainstream than the producers of those artsy independent films that I used to envy.”

“How so?”

“Porno is a fourteen-billion-dollar-a-year industry in this country. Let me give you a sense of scale, Rachel. Fourteen billion dollars exceeds the revenues of professional football, basketball, and baseball combined. Combined. We're bigger than baseball, Mom, and apple pie. We have twenty times the revenue of the entire Broadway theater industry. Consumers spend more money on porno movies than they do on regular movies.”

“That's remarkable.”

“I'll tell you what's even more remarkable. The corporate CEOs and board members who vote straight Republican and grow misty-eyed over family values are the same CEOs and board members whose companies happen to be the biggest players in the porno industry. Who do you think owns the cable and satellite TV franchises and the in-room hotel movie systems that rake in all that money from those X-rated pay-per-view movies and porno networks? Fortune Five Hundred companies, that's who. And guess who owns big chunks of their stock? Pension funds. And that means that Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public from Peoria are going to retire in comfort someday on the money they've made off movies that would make
Deep Throat
seem like a Walt Disney production.” He chuckled. “The greatest source of revenue in this country is old-fashioned hypocrisy. And me? I'm just a bit player in this mad circus—just an independent filmmaker in southern Illinois.”

“What in the world brought you to Sauget?” I asked.

“My health.” He gave me a wink. “I came to Sauget for the waters.”

“The waters?” I replied, playing along. “What waters? We're in the middle of southern Illinois.”

“I was misinformed.”

I smiled.

He said, “A wonderful film.” He grew serious. “So you're here about Billy Woodward?”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Because he has a connection to a case I'm working on.”

“A case? Who's your client?”

“Angela Green.”

“
The
Angela Green?”

I nodded.

He had a puzzled expression. “What possible connection does Billy Woodward have to Angela Green?”

“He was her alibi.”

Silver frowned. “Explain.”

I did. He listened carefully.

When I finished, he asked, “What made you think there was a connection to Angela Green?”

“I didn't think there was. I was pursuing the connection to Michael Green's fiancee. That's where Woodward killed himself. In front of Samantha Cummings's town house. He was on the phone to her just before he shot himself.”

He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “In front of her house,” he finally said. He lowered his gaze to meet mine.

“I need to make sense out of that,” I said. “Why Samantha? I need to find out more about him. My investigator contacted his mother, but she hadn't heard from Billy in ten years. His sister is dead. He didn't seem to have any close friends or a girlfriend. Just some weight-lifting acquaintances. I'll eventually talk to them, but you're my best hope. He worked for you longer than anyone else.”

Silver nodded slowly, rubbing his thumb and forefinger down the sharp edges of his goatee. “I hadn't seen him for a few years,” he said, his voice distant.

“Tell me about him.”

He pursed his lips as he collected his thoughts. “Billy was one of my first actors. He was in his early twenties back then. Nice-looking kid. Hung like a horse. Fairly reliable, too, at least back in the early days. In this business, reliability is just as valuable as size. Billy was a wanna-be hoping to break into the ranks of the male talent.” He paused. “How much do you know about this business?”

“Not much,” I conceded.

He scratched his goatee. “The hierarchy in the hard-core world is unlike the hierarchy in any other part of the film business. At the top of the pyramid are contract girls. They're also known as box-cover girls. That's because what sells the film these days is the box cover, not the contents. Video has revolutionized this industry.”

He turned toward his credenza, where there were two stacks of videocassettes. He took one off the top and turned it toward me. “Here's a good example.” He slid it across his desk.

The video was entitled
On Golden Blonde
and, according to the box-cover blurb, featured April Morning. Ms. Morning was presumably the striking blonde on the cover standing with her legs apart and her fists on her hips. She was dressed in a tiny white teddy, white string bikini, white stockings, white garter belt, and white pumps with six-inch stilettos. In the background, a guy in jeans and a T-shirt sat on the edge of the bed gazing at her from behind.

“The box-cover girls are the superstars,” Silver continued. “They get the big bucks—bigger even than the directors. They don't stick around long, either. They all have the same career plan: get in and out of the business fast and become a featured dancer on the strip club circuit, where they can triple or quadruple their income. Below the box-cover girls are the male talent. They're a fairly small group, and each one is cherished. These guys are the Old Faithfuls of the business, the ones who can deliver the two most important male contributions to the genre: the on-screen erection and the on-command ejaculation. Have you ever seen a hard-core movie, Rachel?”

I nodded, blushing slightly.

“Then you are no doubt familiar with the one essential requirement of the genre. As if it is writ on high, all sex scenes must end with a visible ejaculation. Our male clientele demands it, for reasons best left to the disciples of Sigmund Freud. The climax scene goes by many names—
pop shot, cum shot, payoff shot
. My preferred term is
money shot
, since the men are literally paid by the ejaculation.”

“Really?”

“No money shot, no money. Moving further down the hierarchy we come to the B-girls. These are the fill-ins—an ever-changing group of women who don't have the star power of a box-cover girl but add variety to the films. We recruit them mostly from the strip clubs here on the east side. Every once in a while you'll find one who can blossom into a box-cover girl, but that's rare. And finally, at the bottom of the pyramid are the wanna-bes—the new male hopefuls, like that yutz you saw in there today. We do a casting call about once a month. Ten to twenty of those guys show up—lots of bodybuilders mixed in with laid-off blue-collar workers and an occasional college kid. The guy you saw today was the only one to make it through the last casting call. I thought he had promise, and he did fine his first time. But he had problems last week, and from what I saw in there today this will be his last week in the business.”

“What about Billy Woodward? Where was he on the pyramid?”

“Billy started as a wanna-be. I had high hopes for him. He was a good-looking kid with some real acting talent. Had a nice personality, too. At least at the beginning. He did good work his first year, but then he started having problems.” Harry leaned back in his chair and stroked his goatee. “There's a nasty irony for the male actors in this business. Most of these guys are macho types—often macho with a nasty twist. Believe it or not, many of them take pride in their ability to ejaculate in a woman's face. They think it's proof of their manhood—and there's the irony. You've got these macho body builders whose entire livelihood depends on the performance of the one muscle in their body they can't voluntarily flex. And each time it fails it only increases the pressure for next time. When guys like Billy Woodward get into an unstable flight pattern, they tend to crash and burn real fast. Especially back before Viagra.”

“How long did he last?”

“Maybe eighteen months in front of the camera. But I liked the kid, so I kept him around as a crew hog. He worked as a set designer, an electrician, a general handyman, a shipping clerk. He was a hard worker and a quick study—maybe not the brightest kid, but I'm not running a nuclear physics lab here.”

“How long did he work behind the camera?.”

“About four years.”

“Why did he leave?”

“I fired him.”

“Why?”

Harry grimaced. “Billy was a troubled lad—no father, alcoholic mother, a few brushes with the law early on. I suppose I was fond of him. Probably too fond. I overlooked a lot of his personal problems, but then I started hearing things that disturbed me.”

“What kinds of things?”

“The performance problems Billy had on the set apparently spilled over to his private life. Eventually, he was incapable of a normal sexual relationship with a woman. Apparently, he had no problem maintaining an erection when he was alone. But when he was with a woman, the same performance anxiety that ruined him as an actor ruined him as a lover. Unfortunately—and unconscionably—he decided that the best way to eliminate the pressure was to drug his date. I heard about it from others on the crew. He used to brag to them about his conquests. They gave him a nickname.”

“What?”

“They called him ‘Roofer.'

“I let that sink in.

“Why Roofer?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

“It came from one of the street names for the pills he gave his dates. The things were called ‘roones,' I think, or maybe ‘roofs.' The drug was in the news a few years back. Rohyper—something like that.”

“Rohypnol.”

“Yeah, that's it. Anyway, I was furious when I heard what Billy was doing. As far as I'm concerned, drugging a girl for sex is the moral equivalent of rape. I confronted him, he admitted it, and I fired him on the spot. I threatened to call the cops.”

“Did you?”

“He begged me not to. Promised he wouldn't do it anymore. I still felt sorry for the kid, I guess. So I didn't report it.”