Abracadaver (Esther Diamond Novel) (8 page)

“Oh, really?” said Lucky. “Lopez is being investigated? Got some legal trouble? What a shame. My heart bleeds for him.”

I ignored that, too, since Lucky’s resentment was understandable. It could have been avoided altogether, of course, if he had not chosen a life of crime; but it was understandable.

I changed the subject. “Plus he’s got gremlins, so he’s pretty stressed out.”

“He must be mistaken,” Max said seriously. “Gremlins are a myth. There is no such thing in reality.”

“I didn’t mean real ones,” I said with a smile. “It’s a saying, Max. When your appliances and electronic devices keep breaking down, people say your stuff is infested with gremlins.”

“Ah, I see!” He beamed. “That’s rather clever.”

“Any chance these gremlins will wipe his computer clean of anything to do with Victor Gambello?” Lucky asked grumpily.

“Well, his computer is one of the things that’s stopped working,” I said. “But I really doubt OCCB leaves all the evidence or records for a big case in one cop’s computer, with no duplicates or backup anywhere else.”

“Sometimes I really hate technology,” Lucky grumbled.

“By now, I think Lopez probably hates it, too. He’s on his third cell phone in one month—they just keep dying on him.” I frowned. “I wonder if there should be a recall? Does—”

“Do I understand correctly that two separate cell phones have ceased functioning for Detective Lopez recently? As well as his computer?”

I nodded. “He’s been having a run of bad luck. Oh, and then there are the cars.”

“What about the cars?” asked Lucky.

So I told them.

“He
has
been having bad luck,” Lucky said—with noticeable schadenfreude. “Tell me more. I’m enjoying this.”

“It’s Detective Quinn,” Max murmured, staring at me.

We both looked at him.

“What’s Quinn?” I asked.

“The malfunctioning of communications devices, the disruption of electrical equipment, the unexplained breakdowns in machinery . . .” Staring off into space as he considered these incidents, Max mused, “And there was also Nelli’s reaction.”

“What are you on to, Doc?” Lucky asked. “What are you thinking?”

“All of these things have occurred in the vicinity of Detective Quinn.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but now that Max mentioned it . . . “Well, yes. I guess. He’s around Lopez a lot, so he’d be around any machines or devices that Lopez uses when he’s working.” I remembered something Lopez had said, and I added, “And he used Lopez’s computer before it went haywire. Lopez told me he thought Quinn had done something to it—by accident.”

“Where are you going with this, Max?” Lucky wondered.

“These incidents are signs of the demonic,” he said.

“A car breaking down is a sign of the demonic?” I asked doubtfully.

“Not as an isolated incident, no. But as part of a repetitious pattern?
Yes.
” He stroked his beard pensively. “Three cars, two phones, a computer . . .”

I gasped as I realized something else. “Lopez said all of these things had happened within the past few weeks!”

“Ah!” said Max.

“I get it!” Lucky slammed his hand down on the table. “They’ve been happening since Quinn became his partner!”

“And that’s why Lopez, despite spending lots of time with him, hasn’t noticed anything weird about Quinn! Because the weirdness isn’t in Quinn’s own behavior, it’s in what’s happening
around
him. And it would never occur to Lopez to associate Quinn with these incidents. The only reason he thinks Quinn may be the one who messed up his computer is that the guy used it one day. Apart from that—well, knowing Lopez, it’s not a connection he would see, despite how observant he is.” I added, “It’s not a connection I would see, either, if you hadn’t pointed it out, Max.”

“So we’re saying Quinn is a demon?” Lucky asked.

Max shook his head. “No, I think it more likely that Quinn is being oppressed by a demon. Incidents such as the ones Esther has described are common in cases of demon oppression. That would also explain Nelli’s reaction. She may not have been aggressive toward Quinn, but rather toward something that is enmeshed with him. An entity which is present wherever he is present, but not visible to us.”

“But Nelli saw it,” Lucky said, looking at the dog with admiration.

“Or sensed it,” said Max.

“Good work!” Lucky said. “Good Nelli!”

Upon hearing her name, Nelli wagged her tail, but she did not pause in her enjoyment of her bone.

“Then this demon is what animated Mr. Capuzzo?” I guessed.

“I assume so,” said Max.

“Why?”

“Yes, that is the question we must explore.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed. “I thought you might already know.”

“Well, certainly there are demons that take a strong interest in death, graveyards, tombs, mummies, corpses, human remains . . .”

I pushed my plate away, feeling my appetite wane.

“But reanimation of the dead is unusual.”

“Was it just a prank?” I wondered. “It frightened people. Could that have been the goal?”

“Well done, Esther!” Max beamed at me. “Demons thrive on fear, so that is certainly a possibility.”

“Then there are other possibilities, too,” Lucky guessed.

“Yes. We shall have to investigate this more closely to narrow them down. So we still need what we needed before.”

“More information about Quinn,” I said gloomily.

“And more direct observation of him. There are a number of questions for which we need answers. Who or what is this demonic entity? How or why did it attach itself to Quinn? Is Quinn aware of it or not? And . . .”

“And?” Lucky prodded.

I think I knew the next question. “What does it want?”

“Correct,” said Max. “And what will it do in order to get what it wants?”

Thinking of Lopez again, I said, “And who will it hurt?”

“I
don’t got time for you,” I said. “I’m working. When you come around like this, you’re costing me, detective. You understand what I’m saying? You’re
costing
me.”

“Yeah, whatever. We gotta talk.”

“Oh, really?” I said with scathing contempt. “Is this another one of those talks where you unzip while I get on my knees and open wide?”

“No, it’s the kind of talk where you tell me exactly what you did for Little Ricky last night.”

“Got on my knees and opened wide,” I lied, injecting bitterness into my voice.

“I don’t mean that,” Michael Nolan said, flipping to the next page of his script. “He used you to carry a sample of his merchandise into the Last Call Bar.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What was in it for you, Jilly? Did he pay you? Did you owe him a favor?” Nolan paused, and his voice changed as he said, “Or did he give you more junk? I keep telling you, that stuff’s gonna kill you.”

“You’re barking up the wrong girl,” I said firmly. “I got nothin’ to do with—”

“Don’t even go there, Jilly,” he said. “We’ve got you on video.”

“Doing what?” I challenged brashly. “Going down on Little Ricky? Oh, gosh, I’m
blushing.
”

“No, we got you accepting illegal merchandise and carrying it into a place of business for a criminal transaction.”

“Oh, bull—”

“Next time, don’t conspire right outside a building that has a surveillance camera.”

“I didn’t conspire!”

“You’re gonna tell me who you met with to turn over that sample . . .” Nolan paused, then broke character and said, “I don’t like the wording here.”

We were sitting around a rehearsal table at the C&P company’s production offices. It wasn’t a full-cast read-through, since most of the
D30
actors were currently filming on location, but a couple of regular cast members were here to read the scenes they would appear in with my character. Benoit, the director for this episode, was also here; he was French-Canadian, and it was pronounced Ben-WAH—as I’d learned after initially saying it wrong. There was also Kathleen, who was the writer/producer for this episode, and her assistant, as well as the usual army of staff. Working on a C&P production was unbelievably luxurious compared to most of my experiences. I suspected that if I wanted to blow my nose, one of the production minions in the room would anticipate this and pull the tissue from the box for me.

“. . . who you met with to turn over the sample . . .” Nolan shook his head as he read the line again. “It’s clunky.”

Kathleen nodded and typed a note into her laptop. “You’re right, I’ll fix it.”

“Let’s continue,” prompted Benoit, his French accent very slight.

“You’re gonna tell me blah blah blah,” said Nolan. “Which will be fixed.”

“Which will be fixed,” agreed Benoit. He seemed like a patient man, which is a good thing in a director.

We were reading a flashback scene in the upcoming episode. Detective Jimmy Conway, still lying in his hospital bed (where he’d been for so long that he should probably think about making a down payment on his room and hiring a decorator), was finally semi-lucid, verbal, and trying to remember how he got shot
(again).

He’d been suffering from traumatic amnesia ever since waking up a few episodes ago. “And that’s not just a dramatic device,” Kathleen had assured me when explaining the story. “It’s not unusual for someone who has suffered a traumatic accident to be unable to remember it or the events leading up to it. It’s completely credible that Jimmy doesn’t remember what happened for hours before the shooting.”

“Okay,” I’d said.

I didn’t really care about the veracity. To be honest, I was just glad that Jimmy was having so many flashback memories that involved Jilly. I liked working.

I glanced at Nolan now and read my next line, after Conway insisted that Jilly was going to tell him who she met with. “I don’t know what you’re talking—”

“You’re on
camera,
Jilly! We
got
you!” His voice was getting louder.

“You’re full of it,” I said. “Get lost.”

Kathleen’s assistant read the description of action here. “Jilly tries to walk away. Conway grabs her arm.”

“Jimmy,” said his partner, Detective Cal Donner, played by former underwear model Kihm Hazlett. “Come on.”

Kathleen’s assistant, whose name I couldn’t remember, read, “Donner tries to restrain Conway, who shakes him off and gets rough with Jilly, who’s trying to get away.”

“Let go!” I said angrily. “This is police brutality.”

“You’re gonna tell me,” Conway insisted. “Tell me!”

“Jimmy!” Detective Donner shouted. “Stop!”

As written, this is where the scene would cut away from the nighttime street corner where we exchanged these lines in the flashback sequence, and it would cut to Jimmy Conway’s hospital room with disorienting swiftness, reflecting Jimmy’s own confused state of mind.

Seated beside the bed, where Conway was still hooked up to some tubes, Donner said with concern, “Jimmy . . . that never happened.”

“Huh?”

“There was no surveillance camera. We never had any video of Jilly C-Note.”

“Are you sure? But . . . but what about the—”

“Jimmy . . .” Kihm shook his head and said, “I wasn’t there. I never even saw you that night.”

“What?” Nolan said in vague, distressed confusion.

“What you’re remembering . . . it didn’t happen.”

It was the end of the scene. After a moment, Nolan said to Kathleen, “I think I need another line there.”

“We’re going to get a close-up as you realize what he’s telling you,” she replied, apparently recognizing that what he meant was that he wanted the final moment of the scene to focus on him, not on the other actor.

“Hmm,” said Nolan. “That might be okay.”

Kihm Hazlett’s expression changed to a subtle, wry smile as he kept his gaze fixed on his script. He’d been working with Nolan for a while and knew him well. I suspected he had rather enjoyed the break from Nolan’s daily company that the actor’s two heart attacks had given him in recent months.

Kihm was a California blond who’d made a few embarrassingly bad straight-to-DVD movies after aging out of the underwear game. He’d fallen off the radar for a decade or so after that, then eventually reinvented himself as a capable middle-aged character actor. He’d auditioned for
The Dirty Thirty
when it was a controversial new project that the networks wouldn’t touch, and the producers had cast him against type. Still a good-looking guy who kept in shape, he played perhaps the ugliest character on the show. While Jimmy Conway was corrupt, conflicted, and complex, Cal Donner was a bigot, a brute, and a mean bastard. He was also hardworking and loyal, though, so he got the job done, and he covered for Conway, who went off on drinking binges and sometimes fell down on the job because of his PTSD.

The police of the
actual
Thirtieth Precinct, which ran alongside the Hudson River from West 133rd Street up to West 155th Street, loathed this show’s portrayal of their team so passionately that
D30
didn’t even do location shoots there anymore. A TV production company needs the support of local law enforcement (or at least a grudging minimal level of cooperation), and this cast and crew got the sort of reception from the cops of the Three-Oh that I would get at Fenster & Co., where I had accidentally destroyed most of the fourth floor last month while confronting Evil.

Anyhow, although he was a workaholic and a loyal buddy, Detective Cal Donner wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, so despite his going on a rampage to find his partner’s shooter after Michael Nolan had his heart attacks, he still had no idea who’d shot Jimmy Conway . . . and it was a plotline that had faded from view after a few weeks, as other characters entered the spotlight with new storylines that eclipsed Nolan’s absent character.

So now Conway was trying to remember the night he got shot, but his memories were unreliable—as in the scene we’d just read. As he continued trying, throughout the final three episodes of the season, it would be unclear whether he was having memories or hallucinations . . . but it would become increasingly apparent that he was obsessed with Jilly C-Note.

Donner, eventually believing that Conway’s focus on Jilly meant she knew who the shooter was, would go after her in the next episode. Finding Jilly wouldn’t be easy, and when he did . . . in predictable Donner fashion, he’d wind up beating her badly in his rage and frustration. Even Donner wasn’t dumb enough to do that to someone who might hire a lawyer or file a complaint, but a streetwalker like Jilly wouldn’t do either thing. She’d just yearn for revenge on every cop in the dirty Thirtieth Precinct, wishing she could make them pay for the things they’d done to her.

Meanwhile, it wouldn’t be clear whether Conway remembered harassing Jilly over criminal matters the night he was shot, or whether he was just sexually obsessed with her and fabricating those memories in the confusion of his morphine withdrawal. (In addition to everything else, recovering from the shooting had turned Conway into a morphine addict. Really, I thought, it was amazing that any of these characters could even get through the day.)

I’m unlikely casting for a leading man’s sexual obsession in a more mainstream style of American television show, since my looks aren’t Hollywood gorgeous, but—as with casting the handsome, gentle-eyed Kihm Hazlett as a brute with an ugly soul—
D30
didn’t make predictable casting choices.

I can play romantic leads onstage, and the camera lens doesn’t crack when it focuses on my face—actually, I look okay on screen, since I have decent bone structure and good cheekbones. But I’m not the sort of actress who gets exploited for her beauty while young and then cast aside after she turns forty (and then subsequently seeks plastic surgery in an effort to prolong her career as a babe). My profession means that I keep in shape, but I have a pretty average figure for an actress, rather than a bankable one. With fair skin, brown eyes, and brown hair, I can fit a variety of roles . . . including a bisexual junkie hooker with whom a bent, traumatized, substance-abusing cop had become obsessed.

We would be filming two sex scenes the following week. Segments of each of them would be used as flashbacks during various moments in the season’s final three episodes, as Conway struggled to differentiate between fact and fantasy in his own mind. One of the scenes was obviously (obvious to the
viewer,
that is—not so much to Conway) just an erotic fabrication of Jimmy’s troubled imagination. The other scene was grittier and more realistic, and possibly a memory of actual events from the night of the shooting—though Kathleen wasn’t telling us whether this was the case, and I had the impression she didn’t know. While angrily questioning Jilly on a dark (and conveniently empty) street, anger would turn to lust and Conway would shove her up against a wall and have his way with her in a rough, clawing, and very unwise exchange of bodily fluids.

So, all in all, it was easy to understand why, by the final episode, Jilly would want to see the cops of the Three-Oh lying in a shallow grave.

I doubted she would get her wish, though, since the show had been renewed for another year. And although the season finale wasn’t firm yet, I had the vague impression from Kathleen that Jilly would wind up dying nastily, as so many guest characters did on
D30.
But this plot thread about Jimmy Conway’s gradually returning memory was still new, and the writers didn’t yet seem sure how they’d resolve it, so it remained to be seen whether I’d get a death scene.

In any case, I would get to keep my clothes on for both sex scenes next week. The fantasy scene and the gritty one each took place on city streets, outdoors, standing up. There was no disrobing involved, let alone partial nudity. I had never yet taken off all my clothes for a role, and although it wasn’t completely out of the question, it was a decision I’d rather not face. (Realistically, it might someday be required by a job I really wanted to do, but I’d cross that bridge if and when I came to it.)

Fortunately, I knew from my previous experience of working with him that, despite how unappealing Nolan’s personality was, he was very professional about filming intimate scenes. And although we didn’t like each other (I wondered if
anyone
had ever liked Nolan), we worked well together. Even just doing this first read-through, which was certainly not an immersive acting experience, our characters were already making a connection with each other, and I could feel the potential for interesting energy and tension between them.

Benoit made a few notes about the scene we’d just read, then suggested we continue to the next one involving Jilly. We were just starting on that when the door opened and a bright-eyed staffer with messy hair stuck his head in the room.

“Kathleen? I’m sorry to interrupt. There’s a call for you from the location shoot. Emergency.”

“Emergency?” she repeated, rising to her feet. Her assistant rose, too.

“A water main has burst right where they were filming.”

“Yikes,” said Kihm, as Kathleen hurried out of the room to take the call, with her assistant right behind her. “We can’t afford to lose another day of shooting. What are they going to do?”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” said Nolan. “It’s one thing after another since I came back.”

Seeing my curious expression, Kihm explained, “This is the third week in a row that something has screwed up our filming schedule.”

“That’s trouble,” I said in commiseration.

Filming is expensive, and full-length TV dramas have very tight, demanding schedules. In addition to being costly, the problems Kihm mentioned probably meant that everyone had worked extra long hours to compensate for the wasted time and unexpected changes.

“Last week,” Nolan said, “the whole studio lost power for half a day. Can you believe that shit?”

He sounded as if he had taken it personally.

“The week before that,” said Kihm, “one of the show’s equipment trucks skidded on ice when it arrived at the location to set up. The driver lost control—”