A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard (28 page)

“I get the picture. And since movies also mean fame and money, there are people who'll want to sue the company for one thing or another if they think they can get away with it. So that means the movie outfit always needs lawyers to joust with the other people's lawyers.”

“Just like in real life,” said Zee. “Anyway, Jack Slade will be coming in next week, and the camera people will be coming in, and the other working stiffs will be coming in, and all of them will be getting things ready so when it comes time to start shooting, there won't be any delays, because delays cost money and location shooting costs money, anyway. Which reminds me . . .”

“What?”

“They'll shoot the modern scenes here on the island, including the ones of me in the modern bar and on the modern street. But a lot of the scenes about the old-time pirate will be shot in Hollywood on a sound stage. That means I'll have to go out there again.”

I looked at the ceiling. “Ah.”

“It shouldn't take long. But if you don't want me to do it, I'll tell them to forget the whole thing.” She snuggled closer. “If I have to choose between them and you and Joshua, I choose you and Joshua. No contest.”

I held her close, filled with contradictory feelings. “No problem,” I said. “You don't have to choose.”

Early the next morning the three of us went into Edgartown to the Dock Street Coffee Shop to celebrate Zee's return. We had high-cholesterol breakfasts: juice, coffee, fried eggs with buttered toast and sausage. Delish!

The regulars were glad to see Zee, and told her extravagant stories about my behavior during her absence. She said she believed them all, but that she'd soon have me straightened out, now that she was home. >From his pack on my back, Joshua listened to every word. No one said a thing about the late Lawrence Ingalls.

Out on docks where the charter boats load and unload, we eyed the
Shirley J.
and decided, it being a fine August
day, and maybe the last free one we'd have for a while if Drew Mondry really did plan to hire me, we should go for a sail.

So we did that, beating first down-harbor through the anchored boats and on through the narrows into Katama Bay, then coming back and going outside past the lighthouse and over to Cape Pogue Pond, where we anchored for lunch down by the south shore.

There, while Joshua and Zee enjoyed the beach, I waded out and raked for the giant quahogs that live in the pond just offshore from the little boathouse there. They are the biggest quahogs I've ever seen, but they're deep in the seaweed and there aren't many of them, so they're hard to find. I once got seven and they were so big that the seventh sank the little floating basket I was using; today, though, it was all hunting and no finding.

No matter, while I had waded and raked, I'd used the time to think about several things.

We packed up and sailed back through a falling wind just in time to catch the last of the rising tide, which carried us and the other returning boats past the On Time ferry and into Edgartown Harbor.

We ghosted up to our stake on the last whisper of wind, dropped sail and made everything fast, and went ashore. There, who should we meet but the chief, who had spotted us coming in and had driven his cruiser down the Reading Room dock, where we kept our dinghy.

“Purely a chance meeting,” he said, puffing on the pipe he had just lit up. “Thought you might be interested in knowing that even Officer Olive Otero no longer believes you bumped off Ingalls. She can't figure any way for you to have gotten your hands on the murder weapon, so you're off her list.”

“Well, good for Officer Otero,” I said. “Now who does she think did it?”

“I believe that Moonbeam is currently the favorite candidate,” said the chief. “And since you're now officially as
pure as driven snow, I'm letting that word leak out to the locals. With luck, most of the ones who've been avoiding you will stop doing that, and the others will quit congratulating you for knocking him off.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I probably shouldn't give a damn about what any of them think, but I do.”

“Like most people would,” said the chief. “It's that decent respect for the opinions of mankind that the Declaration talks about. The people who don't have it are the ones who keep guys like me in business. You were a cop. You know what I mean. Hello, there, Joshua. Nice to see you home again, Mrs. Jackson. I hear you're going to be a movie star.”

Zee was surprised. “Who told you that?”

He waved his pipe. “No secrets can be kept from us minions of the law.”

“All right, then,” I said, “who kacked Lawrence Ingalls?”

“Well, maybe there are a few things we aren't absolutely sure about yet,” he replied. “That's one of them. But we'll figure that one out, too.” He looked at Zee. “As for your career on the silver screen, this movie outfit has been in touch with us hick cops about security. A guy named Mondry mentioned you as local talent.”

“Oh,” said Zee. “Well, don't worry. I'll still speak to you little people after I'm famous, because I'll never forget my roots. What was your name again?”

The chief drove away, and we went home.

Not much later, Drew Mondry called and asked me to go to work for him the next day. He mentioned a salary rare on Martha's Vineyard.

I said I would. The money was reason enough, but I had others.

Cassiopeia Films got down to work the week after Labor Day, when the island was largely emptied of its summer people, most of whom had gone home so the kids could go back to school or who had otherwise used up their vacation time and had taken their August tans back over the sound to America. A slightly higher than average proportion of tourists lingered on this year because of the movie makers. They wanted to watch celebrities and maybe even be lucky enough to be extras. Zee arranged her schedule at the emergency room so she could be home while I was working, and I made sure that I'd have time off to take care of Joshua when the film crew shot her scenes.

There were a lot of people involved in making the movie, and many of them had titles that I never did get straight. Grips did all sorts of handyman work, especially when cameras were being set up. The best ones I saw had strong backs and quick minds. There were also carpenters and painters and set decorators and various wardrobe people, all of whom more or less did what you'd think people with those titles would do. And there were propmen, and there was a special propman called a greensman who only did plants, and since the Skye twins' horses were going to be in the background of some of the shots on John and Mattie's farm, there was a wrangler in charge of them. And there were drivers, of which I was one when I wasn't doing other things, who drove people around, and there were people who turned out to be a stuntman and a stuntwoman for a fight scene I never saw.

No matter what the job, everybody seemed to belong to one union or another, which was in itself something different for largely un-unionized Martha's Vineyard.

There were doubles for Kevin and Kate and other actors, and there was a fencing master who coached Kevin and the other sword fighters and created a sort of ballet for them to dance while they were supposedly fighting, so no one would get hurt. John Skye, long-ago undergraduate three-weapon man, was fascinated and appalled by the movie combat. On the one hand, he claimed that anybody who actually tried to fight with swords that way would be dead in about thirty seconds, but on the other he had to admit that it looked like a lot more fun than the competitive fencing he'd done in college.

All in all the whole operation seemed like chaos to me. I never did get everybody and everything figured out, and finally stopped trying.

Since there were both interior and exterior scenes to be shot at John and Mattie's farm, the Skyes were obliged to abandon their house and find quarters elsewhere. In partial thanks for this, Drew Mondry, true to his word, made sure, to the total delight of the twins, that they and their mother got work as extras. The twins' real problem had been to talk Mattie and John into letting them sacrifice the beginning of school for the sake of their future careers as stars, but somehow the girls, great cajolers, had managed to do that. John himself, on the other hand, could not avoid going to work at Weststock College, but made it back for long weekends.

The lines of eager local would-be extras were so long that the island high school gym was taken over on a Sunday so that the decision makers could, in their to-me-mysterious wisdom, make their choices about which of the local wannabes would actually be hired. The fortunate elect were as joyful as their less successful competitors were blue.

Zee, who had learned that she would be obliged to join
the union because of her one line of dialogue, was not required to go through this process, of course, but she thought that I should.

“You really should,” she said to me while making kissy faces at Joshua, who was on her knee smiling up at her. “I think you'd have fun.”

“I don't see a lot of people in the business who seem to be having lots of fun,” I said. “Fun is a bluefish blitz.”

“You look like somebody who lives on Martha's Vineyard,” said Zee. “They need people like you for ambiance.”

“Ambiance, schmambiance. One star in the family is enough. I'm a behind-the-scenes kind of guy, and I don't expect that to last much longer.”

“Maybe I should take Joshua down and have him screen-tested. He's definitely the best baby on the island and maybe in the whole world! Yes, you are, Joshua!” She and her son beamed at each other.

“You can take him down if you want to,” I said, “but if he gets a job, all the other moms will be jealous and think it's just nepotism.”

“They're already jealous, aren't they, Joshua! Because you're the cutest baby anybody's ever seen!”

Joshua grinned toothless agreement, and she gave him a big kiss.

Good grief, what a pair.

My principal value was as a local guy who knew how to take people places they wanted to go, and where to find stuff people suddenly discovered they needed. I knew where the hardware stores and the lumberyards were, where catering outfits could be found, who to contact in case some Cassiopeia bigwig wanted to use a piece of property or equipment that hadn't previously been leased, or in case some emergency came up, as they regularly seemed to do.

I mostly worked for Drew Mondry, but sometimes got loaned out to somebody else who needed wheels or local knowledge. I drove people around to look at the sites
Mondry and I had surveyed earlier, picked people up here and delivered them there, and in general made a good salary doing nothing very hard.

I met a lot of people imported from California and grew to like many of them in that casual way you meet and enjoy people you know you won't be with very long. Most of them were working stiffs who never got in front of a camera or wanted to, and I ended up introducing the beer-drinking component of that group to the Fireside, in Oak Bluffs, where they could have an end-of-the-day brew in casual, to say the least, surroundings. The higher-toned drinkers found their way to the classier watering holes.

One person who was not a working stiff also came to the Fireside. Kate Ballinger didn't seem like the type who would favor the place, which was rich with the odor of stale beer and the muted fragrance of marijuana, and was the traditional site of the occasional barroom brawls that spiced up Vineyard nightlife. She seemed more the snazzy inn type or the Navigator Room type, but on the second night that some other workers and I were in the Fireside, Kate Ballinger appeared in the door, looked around, and came right over.

The noise of the saloon fell off as eyes followed her across the room. Even Bonzo, who decades before had reputedly blown out a promising mind on bad acid and was rarely excited about anything but fishing and listening to birds, paused, bar rag in hand, and looked at her, wide in both eyes and mouth. Kate Ballinger was the prettiest thing to enter the Fireside since Zee had brought Joshua in to show him off to the regulars.

She smiled and said, “Hi, guys. Mind if I join you?” and sat down beside me at the bar. She looked at the bartender and flicked a finger toward my Sam Adams. “I'll have what he's having,” she said.

The bartender pulled himself together and put a bottle and glass in front of her. She poured and sipped.

“Good beer,” she said.

The crew members were the only unimpressed people in the room. They had seen too many movie stars to be awed by another one. They lifted their glasses and bottles and said, “How you doin'?” and “Cheers,” and continued with their talk. Some of them looked with blank faces at her and then at me and only then continued with their talk.

“Good beer,” she said again, taking another sip so small that you knew beer, even a fine one like Sam Adams, was not her usual drink. Then she touched her glass to mine. “Cheers,” she said. “How are things going, J.W.?”

“I'm the last person you should ask,” I said. “I don't have any idea what's going on.”

She laughed. “I could say the same for some of the directors I've worked with. How's that pretty wife of yours?”

“I'll know in about fifteen minutes,” I said.

“Oh.” She tipped her head to one side, and gave me a smile I recognized from some movie I'd seen her in. “You're not staying around for another drink or two?”

It had been a seductive smile in the movie and it had worked. Now, in real life, I could understand why it had.

I looked at my glass. It was almost empty. I still felt thirsty.

“I think this will do it for me,” I said. “Zee'll have a martini and supper waiting for me. I'm about ready for both.”

She arched a brow. “Ah. And when you're at home and your wife is working, do you have a martini and supper waiting for her?”