Abracadaver (Esther Diamond Novel) (9 page)

“Incompetent bastard,” Nolan grumbled.

Kihm exchanged a glance with me, then continued, “No one was hurt, thank God, but the truck plowed into a storefront. It was a huge mess, lots of equipment damaged, the site couldn’t be used . . . We lost a whole day that time.”

I wondered briefly if Lopez’s buddy in the NYPD’s film unit had dealt with any of this.

A stab of anxiety pierced me. What was Lopez going to say when we talked about our relationship? What was
I
going to say? And when were we going to have that talk, anyhow? We’d left things pretty loose . . . and, I recalled, pretty tense, too.

That led me to thinking about Quinn.

Is he in danger—or is he dangerous? And how much danger is Lopez in because of him?

“Oh, come, you don’t believe in that shit, do you?” said Nolan.

“Huh?” I realized I’d missed part of the conversation.

“Okay, maybe we’re not
cursed,
” Kihm said with a self-deprecating smile, “but something’s off, you know? Our energy, our karma. Whatever. Three accidents in three weeks? It wouldn’t hurt to get a shaman to come do a cleansing of the whole production.”

“That is so fucking California.” Nolan picked up his coffee mug and held it up in the air. Behind him, a young woman hopped out of her chair, took his cup, and left the room to go get him another hot beverage.

Which was definitely not coffee. He was drinking some sort of designer herbal tea whose leaves were plucked ceremoniously by mute Buddhist saints in the mountains of Sri Lanka and then processed organically in a diamond mine in Finland. Or something.

Nolan, I had learned within minutes of arriving for work today, had become a health nut since surviving his second heart attack. There being no zealot like a convert, he no longer allowed caffeine, alcohol, sugar, red meat, saturated fat, or refined starch to pollute the sacred temple of his body.

This voluntary deprivation did not, I noted, make him any better company than he had been before his brush with mortality.

“Okay,” said Kihm, “if a shaman makes you uncomfortable—”

“I’m not uncomfortable, it’s just a stupid idea.” Nolan spoke with all his habitual charm and tact.

“—then how about a priest doing a blessing? Or,” Kihm added with a courteous nod to me, “maybe we could get a rabbi. Would a rabbi do a blessing, Esther?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe if you ask nicely.”

My parents tried, but my religious education is pretty shaky. Fortunately, we had a very nice Reform rabbi who let me explore the history of Yiddish theater for my bat mitzvah—the ceremony in Jewish tradition where a child becomes an adult—after it became apparent that a more traditional course of study just wouldn’t go well for me.

“Or how about we just fire the idiots causing these problems and hire some competent people?” Nolan said.

“Who do you think
caused
a water main to break?” Kihm challenged.

“Someone should have known it was going to happen.”

Benoit, quite sensibly, rose to his feet and made a vague excuse to absent himself from the room until Kathleen finished her call and we could recommence the read-through.

“Well, I just don’t think it would hurt to do something to create a little positive energy around here, is all I’m saying,” Kihm concluded with a shrug. Then he changed the subject, turning to me to ask what I’d been doing since I had last worked with them back in August.

The Vampyre,
the Off Broadway play I’d been in all autumn, was the only thing I’d done since then that I was willing to discuss.

“Oh, right,” said Kihm, looking interested. “That was in all the tabloids for a while because of that weird murder where some vampire groupie was bled dry. They got the guy, didn’t they?”

“Sort of. He died while fleeing the police.” More or less.

During the run of that play, I had nearly been eaten by that vampire serial killer. Thack, whom Max had drafted into helping us with that problem, had found the whole thing deeply distasteful and was eager to put it out of his mind afterward.

Kihm asked, “Wasn’t the lead role played by an actor who pretends he
is
a vampire?”

“Yep.” And pretending was all there was to it. “He went to pretty extreme lengths to maintain that image.”

“
You’ve
done Off Broadway?” said Nolan with unflattering surprise.

“Yes.”

“
I’ve
never done Off Broadway,” he said, as if this were relevant.

“That must have been weird,” Kihm said. “What was that guy like?”

“An ego the size of the planet Jupiter.”

“Wow,” said Kihm, absolutely deadpan. “That must be hard to work with. I’d sure hate to deal with someone like that.”

“Indeed.”

We both glanced at Nolan as he grabbed his cup of steaming herbal elixir from the returning staffer without even looking at her. “Who the hell is this guy?”

I said to Kihm, “He’s making a cable movie now.”

“Let me guess—still playing a vampire?”

I smiled as I nodded.

“
I
could do a vampire,” said Nolan. “But I just don’t think it would stretch me. So what would be the point?”

“But would you do it if it was Off Broadway?” Kihm asked him, with an amused glance at me.

“Fuck theater,” Nolan said dismissively. “Who’s got time for that shit?”

“So what else is going on?” Kihm asked me politely. “Did I hear Kathleen say that you’re working in an indie film at the same time you’re doing this show?”

I abided by Thack’s instructions not to tell anyone here that my movie had been canceled, but I didn’t want to manufacture lies about it. So I quickly changed the subject by asking Kihm if he had any projects lined up for his downtime after the end of the shooting season.

“No, our schedule has been such a killer this year, I’m just going to take some time off. Get reacquainted with my wife and kids.” He glanced at his watch and added, “In fact, since we’re not doing anything right now, I think I’ll go call home and tell them I’ll be working late again. I’m supposed to go to today’s location and film a scene after we’re done here, and they’ll be running way behind schedule today.”

I didn’t realize until after he exited the room that he was leaving me alone here with Nolan.

I liked Kihm, but the words
rat bastard
did briefly cross my mind.

Okay, Nolan and I weren’t
alone,
exactly, since there were a bunch of staffers in the room with us. But I didn’t know any of them, and Nolan barely regarded them as people. So there was a real danger that he’d talk to
me.

Seeking salvation, I picked up my coffee mug, hopped to my feet, and turned toward the door.

A production minion immediately leapt to his feet, blocked my escape path, and asked, “Do you need anything, Miss Diamond?”

“No, thanks. I’m just going to get some coffee.”

Nolan said, “That stuff will kill you.”

“I’ll get it!” The minion reached for my mug.

I held onto it. “No, that’s okay. I can get—”

“No, no, you sit,” he insisted, tugging on my cup. “I’ll get it.”

Rather than engage in a wrestling match, I surrendered the mug. Then I realized in exasperation that, having sent him off to get coffee for me, I couldn’t make some other excuse to leave the room now, since then I wouldn’t be here when the guy got back with my beverage. And that would be rude. (Did I mention I’m from the Midwest?)

Hoping that Kathleen and the others would return momentarily, I sat back down and resigned myself to enduring a few minutes of conversation with Nolan—who did not, of course, ignore his captive audience.

“I’m doing five miles a day on the treadmill now,” he said, as if I had asked. “I work on increasing speed for a couple of weeks, and then I increase distance for a couple of weeks. You should try it.”

“Hm.”

He talked for a while longer about his exercise regimen. Then he switched to the fascinating subject of his one hundred percent organic diet. Next, we covered the scintillating topic of how young and vital he thought his lifestyle change was making him look. At some point during this deluge of unsolicited personal information, I received my cup of coffee, which I drank while Nolan explained that it was prematurely aging me and probably accounted for the dark circles he thought he saw under my eyes.

When I realized I was thinking longingly of throwing myself out of the window and onto the slush-covered street below, I decided to change the subject. There was, of course, no realistic hope of getting Nolan off the topic of himself—not without others here to assist me,
damn
them all for abandoning me with him! But I had to get him off the subject of his health. I had reached my limit and was feeling ready to give him one of
my
ventricles if that would get him to stop talking about his own.

So I asked, as if I cared, “How long were you off work?”

He grimaced. “Four months, more or less. They filmed me lying unconscious in a hospital bed a couple of times early on, but since it was my real hospital bed, it didn’t exactly count as ‘work.’”

“I guess being back feels good?”

He shrugged. “I guess.”

That surprised me. I figured a narcissistic workaholic like Nolan would be delighted to be back in the game, in front of the camera again, and getting the show rewritten at the last minute in order to accommodate a new subplot featuring his character.

“Do you feel like you came back to work too soon?” I asked.

“No, the opposite. I think I let the damn doctors talk me into convalescing for too long,” he grumbled.

I thought he meant he should have come back sooner to prevent Jimmy Conway from losing the spotlight to other characters.

But then Nolan looked around, saw that the other bodies in the room were ignoring our conversation (and who could blame them?), leaned close to me, and said in a low voice, “I feel like I’ve lost my edge. You know what I mean?”

“Oh . . . Well, this was just a cold read-through,” I pointed out. “When we’re in costume and on set, you’ll—”

“No,” he shook his head. “I can’t just wait around and hope that’ll bring it all back.”

“Bring all what back?” I didn’t feel compelled to be nice to him, but he was a fellow actor and I thought I could guess what was bothering him. So I said, “Look, you’ve been very ill, and you haven’t worked for a while. Not really.” A couple of brief appearances recently as the heavily drugged Jimmy still lying in a hospital bed and muttering a short, drowsy line or two of dialogue probably didn’t count. “So it’s natural to feel a little cold or stiff or anxious. But if you focus, do the work, and trust—”

“I’m not worried about my
craft,
” he said, apparently taking offense. “That’s as top-notch as it ever was. What, you think I was just sitting on my ass the whole time I was recovering?”

“Okay, I guess you’re fine then.” I regretted that I had shown an interest, even for a moment.

“It’s not focus or technique I’m worried about, it’s
edge.
Like I said.”

“Edge?” I repeated without interest, about to rise to my feet and excuse myself for an unnecessary trip to the bathroom so that I could get a break from his company.

“Yeah, edge.” He gripped my forearm, as if realizing that I was about to flee. “Jimmy is very
street.
Very gritty. He’s part of the primal pulse of the alley, the gutter, the fresh crime scene, the wailing sirens of a nine-one-one call. He has that energy. That texture.”

“Right.”

“
I
don’t fake it.
I
have to be authentic.” Nolan’s tone suggested this was a major difference between himself and other actors—including me. I resented this; I also suspected the regular
D30
cast was accustomed to resenting it on a weekly basis. “My fans expect
truth
from me.”

“Uh-huh.” I tried to pull my arm away. He didn’t notice.

“If I don’t make Jimmy believable for them, I’ll be letting them down,” he said tragically.

“You’ve been making him believable for them ever since the series began.” I hated coming so close to complimenting him, but there was no denying that Nolan’s compelling portrayal of Jimmy Conway was a crucial component in
D30’s
success.

“And I have a responsibility to maintain that level of quality. Of
reality.
”

Reality? His character was an alcoholic, morphine-addicted cop with occasionally debilitating PTSD who’d been gunned down twice in two years, in a squad so blatantly corrupt that real NYPD cops either guffawed or hyperventilated with aggravation when criticizing the program.

Okay, fine. Whatever.

In the hope that Nolan would let go of my arm, I decided to bring these flights of grandiosity down to a more prosaic level to close the subject. “In that case, what you’re talking about is research.”

“Research?” He frowned thoughtfully. “Hm . . .
Research.
You know . . . you may have something there.”

“Go shadow some cops for a few days,” I said with a nod. “That’ll get you back in the saddle.”

“It’s not a bad idea.” Coming from Nolan, this was a huge compliment. “I guess I haven’t been out on a ride-along with real cops since before we started filming the first season.” He added petulantly, “No cops were willing to take me after the show started airing.”

That didn’t surprise me, but I said, “Oh, I’m sure your production department can talk
someone
on the NYPD into letting its Emmy-nominated star shadow them.” I tested his hold on my arm again and was pleased to discover that he was so absorbed in contemplation of this suggestion that I could pull away easily now. I did so, and I started rising to my feet to make my escape. “You can get back some of that texture you lost during convalescence by following a streetwise cop around for a few days.” Standing now, I looked down at Nolan. “Watch him work, follow his every move, go wherever he goes, and . . . and . . .” I stopped jabbering at Nolan as I realized what I was saying.

“I like it,” he said, nodding. “They really don’t have me doing much around here until we start filming the next episode. I’ve got time to shadow someone for a few days.”