Bloody River Blues: A Location Scout Mystery (10 page)

Buffett kept staring at him.

Pellam cleared his throat. The silence filled in again. He said, “I didn’t know if you’d like a bottle. What d’you drink anyway? Beer?”

“I got shot in the back.”

“I heard. How you feeling?”

“How do you think I feel?”

Silence again. Pellam decided there wasn’t going to be any lighthearted banter and joshing. He stood back from the chair and crossed his arms. “Look. I’m sorry about what happened. But I’d like to ask a favor. Your buddies in the police department, a couple detectives particularly, are giving me a pretty hard time. You know, following me. They think I saw this guy who was in the car—”

Buffett, eyes on the TV screen, blurted, “Well, you
did
.”

“I didn’t see him,” Pellam said evenly. “I know you think I did. But I didn’t.”

Buffett kept staring at the tube. His eyes were dark, agitated. He licked the corner of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. This made him seem like a cornered animal. “How could you help but? He was in the front seat.”

“There was glare.”

“The hell there was glare.”

Pellam’s face flushed. “You think I’m covering up something? I’m not. I described the guy who bumped into me.”

“Oh, that’s mighty brave of you.
I
saw him. We don’t need
his
description. Anyway, he’s rabbited. He was just the hired gun and he’s back in Miami or Chicago by now.”

“Do you think they paid me off?”

“I think you’re like everybody else. You don’t want to get involved.”

Pellam sighed. “I better be going.”

“I think when you look in the front seat of a car, you fucking see somebody. I think when you
move
your mouth, you’re
talking
to somebody!”

“I wasn’t—”

“You saw him! I saw you look right into his face.”

“If you saw so damn much why the hell didn’t
you
see him?”

“How much did they pay you?”

“I didn’t—”

“Listen, mister,” Buffett blurted viciously, “you’re gonna have cops on your ass every minute of the day! They’re going to stay on you. They’re not going to let you crap until you tell—”

Pellam waved his hand in frustration and walked to the door.

“You son of a bitch!” Buffett’s face was livid, tendons rose in his neck, and flecks of spittle popped from his lips. His voice choked and for a moment Pellam feared he was having a heart attack. When he saw that Buffett was simply speechless with rage he himself stormed out of the door.

And walked squarely into a young woman as she entered.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

She blinked and stepped aside timidly. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

The woman was thin, blond, late twenties, dressed unflashy, like an executive secretary, looking shy and embarrassed. Pellam assumed she was the cop’s wife
and thought he was lucky to be married to someone so pretty. He also thought she was going to have to put up with pure hell for a long, long time.

She said, “I’m looking for Dr. Albertson.”

Pellam shook his head, shrugged and walked past her.

In the hall he heard Buffett shouting to him, “Sure, so just leave. Just like that! Go ahead, you son of a bitch!”

The voice faded as he proceeded down the corridor. The cop on guard said something, too, something Pellam didn’t hear, though from the snide smile on his face, he guessed it was no friendlier than the cop’s farewell. Then he was at the elevator, kneading his hands and feeling his jaws clench with anger. He punched the down button seven times before he realized it had lit up and the car was on its way.

A woman’s voice startled him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to barge in.”

He glanced back and saw the blond woman walk up, looking at the floor indicator.

Pellam’s mouth tightened. “No problem.”

“He looks familiar.” She glanced back up the corridor.

“Who?”

“Well, your friend. The man in the room you were just in.”

“Don’t
you
know him?”

She explained that she didn’t. She was looking for her mother’s doctor and the nurse had sent her there. She nodded toward the room. “Who is he?”

Pellam said, “He’s the cop, the one that got shot.”

“Oh, sure! The
Post-Dispatch
. They ran his picture. What’s his name?”

“Donnie Buffett.”

“He’s your friend?”

Pellam waved his hand. “What you heard back there . . . I don’t think you’d call him much of a friend.”

The elevator arrived. They both stepped in. Behind them stood a man in a dressing gown, his hand grasping a tall IV bag on wheels like a chrome hat rack.

“The doctor’s left for lunch already.” She grimaced. “I was supposed to meet him here about Mother. Now I’ve got to come back in an hour.”

“Your mother’s a patient?”

“Hysterectomy. She’s fine. Well, she’s complaining nonstop but that means she’s fine.”

The elevator, slowly filling with her fruity perfume, arrived on the ground floor. “So,” he said as they walked outside into the cool air of the spacious lobby.

“Well.”

“My name’s John Pellam.”

She took his hand. “Nina Sassower.”

They walked out the front door of the hospital and Nina surveyed the street. She had a great profile; the lines of her face were . . . What came to mind? Unencumbered.

Then he smiled ruefully to himself.
Unencumbered.
Too much movie talk, too much artistic vision. No, she’s
sensuous,
she’s
pretty.
She’s
sexy.

Pellam looked at his watch. He had a lot to do and not much time to do it in—getting the insurance binders
for the bungalows, running his daily check on the dozens of shooting permits to make sure they hadn’t expired during this elongated filming schedule, calling his bank in Sherman Oaks about the mortgage to finance his own film,
Central Standard Time,
seeing what other markers he had that he might call in—and all the while dodging cops.

What he did, though, was none of these things. Instead he asked, “You interested in lunch?”

And, as it turned out, she was.

AT THREE THAT
afternoon Pellam was in the camper, about to ride to the set, when his phone buzzed. He snagged it and propped it between his shoulder and his cocked head as he pulled on his leather jacket. “ ’Lo?”

“Dinner tomorrow.”

“Okay. Is that you, Marty?”

“Here’s the deal. You ready? . . . Telorian.”

Pellam did not speak for a moment. “Are you sure?”

“Ugh. Am I sure?” Weller repeated sarcastically.

Ahmed Telorian. The fifty-year-old Armenian-Iranian investor (after the hostage thing he began calling himself “Persian”) had grown to love American movies as much as he loved making millions from electronic component sales. Telorian and his wife had bought, gutted, and renovated an old theater in Westwood. They had turned it into a cult stronghold, in which they showed oddball films, many of them film noir, John Pellam’s forte.

Telorian and Pellam had spent an evening together several years ago, drinking and talking about Claire
Trevor and Gloria Grahame and Robert Mitchum and Ed Dmytryk. They argued vocally and with white knuckles around their thick glasses of ouzo.

The reason for that meeting several years ago was Telorian’s other avocation—producer of low-budget films. He had read Pellam’s
Central Standard Time
and was interested in optioning it. This happened to be at a time when Pellam had not wished to have anything to do with film companies, except location scouting. A generous offer of option money was rejected and Telorian had huffed away from the meeting. Pellam had not thought about him since then. He now felt his pulse increase a few tempos as he asked, “He’s in Maddox?”

More likely to see Elvis hustling for a table at the Hard Rock Cafe.

“He happened to be in Chicago. My secretary tracked him down. You kind of blew him off a few years ago, he says.”

“I blew everybody off a few years ago.”

“It’s not like he’s taking it personally. Not
too
personally. He still thinks
Central Standard
can be a hit. He’s got to be home day after tomorrow but I got him to agree to stop over in St. Louis to talk to you.”

“What does he feel about me directing?”

“Not a problem. He just wants to know how you’d do it. Times aren’t as flush as they used to be. He’s interested in hits. He doesn’t mind a grainy film. But it has to be
hit
grainy film. Got it?”

“When’s his plane get in?”

“Whenever he tells his pilot to land. Meet us at eight at the Waterfront Sheraton. Lobby bar. You know where it is?”

“I can find it.”

“About forty, fifty minutes from Maddox.”

“He’s got the treatment? The script?” Pellam asked.

“He’s got everything. All you need to bring is as much Tony Sloan gossip as you can dig up.”

IN THE FLORAL-WALLPAPERED
entryway was a white Formica table. On it rested a Lucite pitcher filled with plastic flowers. To the left, through an arched doorway, was a parlor. The furniture in the rooms was mostly 1950s chain store—kidney-shaped tables, blond wood chairs, wing-backs and love seats upholstered in beige, a lot of plastic. Plastic everywhere. In the corner of the parlor was a young woman in a white blouse and black pedal pushers, struggling through a Chopin étude. A young, muscular man in brown slacks and yellow short-sleeved shirt leaned against the piano, smiling at her and nodding slowly.

“When I first saw you, you know, it was the night of the dance. It was—”

“I remember.” She stopped playing and looked up.

“It was hot as a in-line block. You were across the room under that Japanese lantern.”

“That lantern, it was the one that was busted.”

“Sure, it was busted and the bulb shone through that paper and covered you in light. That’s when I knowed you was the girl for me.” He put his hand on hers.

A heavyset man appeared slowly in the doorway. He lifted a Thompson submachine gun. The couple turned to him. Their smiles vanished.

“No!” the woman screamed. The man started forward toward the assailant. The gun began its fierce rattling. Pictures, vases, lamps exploded, black holes popped into the wall, bloody wounds appeared on the bodies of the couple as they reached toward each other. As the magazine in the submachine gun emptied and a throbbing silence returned, the couple slowly spiraled to the floor, their slick, bloody hands groping for each other’s. Their fingers touched. The bodies lay still.

None of the fifteen or so sweaty people standing in the room around the immobile, bloody bodies said a single word. No one moved. Most of them were not even staring at the couple but were looking instead at the bearded man in jeans and green T-shirt who leaned against a reflector stand, his red eyes dancing pensively around the room. Tony Sloan paced over the spent machine-gun cartridges. He was shaking his head.

The man in brown sat up, wiped blood off his nose, and said, “Come on, Tony. It works.”

“Cut,” came the shout from behind the camera.

The bloody actress jumped to her feet and slapped her sticky palms on her hips. “Oh, Christ,” she muttered viciously.

Sloan stepped closer to the carnage, surveying it. He spat out “It
doesn’t
‘work.’ ”

The machine gunner pulled cotton out of his ears and said, “What’s he say?”

The actress grimaced. “He says it doesn’t work.”

The killer shrugged.

Sloan motioned to Danny the script writer and the assistant director, a young blond woman in her early
thirties. The three of them huddled in the corner of the room, while wardrobe and grips spread out onto the set, cleaning up. “We gotta shoot it outside,” Sloan said.

The assistant director’s golden ponytail swaggered as she nodded vigorous approval.

“Outside?” Danny sighed. According to the Writer’s Guild contract, he was paid a great deal of money every time he revised
Missouri River Blues.
The fun of making that money, however, had long ago worn off.

“It’s not, you know, dynamic enough,” Sloan mused. “We need a sense of motion. They should be
moving
. I think it’s important that they
move
.”

Danny pulled
his
earplugs out. “If you remember the book and if you remember the shooting script, they escaped.
I
didn’t kill them in the first place.”

The director said, “No, no, no, I don’t mean that. They’ve
got
to die. I just think they should get killed outside. You know, like it suggests they’re that much closer to freedom. Remember Ross’s fear.”

“Fear of the lock-down,” the assistant director recited, shaking her stern blond ponytail. It was impossible to tell if she was speaking with reverence or sarcasm.

Danny wound his own ponytail, the color of a raven’s wings, around stubby fingers, then touched from his cheek a fleck of red cardboard from the blank machine-gun shells. He looked as exhausted as Sloan. “Tell me what you want, Tony. You want them dead, I’ll make them dead. You want them dead outside, I’ll make them dead outside. Just tell me.”

The director shouted, “Pellam? Shit, did he leave?”

Pellam, who had not been wearing earplugs but had been sitting on the front hall stairs thirty feet away from the shooting, stood up and walked into the living room. He dodged bits of pottery and glass and stepped over two arms assistants in protective gear who were removing several of the explosive gunshot-impact squibs that had failed to detonate.

Sloan asked him, “What about a road?”

“Why do you want a road?”

“I’d like them to die on a road,” Sloan said. “Or at least near a road.”

The actress in pedal pushers said, “I don’t want to get shot again. It’s loud and it’s messy and I don’t like it.”

“You’ve got to die,” Sloan said. “Quit complaining about it.”

With a bloody finger she pointed to the cartridge of film the assistant photographer was pulling off the Panaflex camera. “I’m dead. It’s in the can.”

The director stared at the ground. “What I’d like is to find a road going through woods. No, a field. A big field. Maybe beside a school or something. Ross and Dehlia are planning one last heist. But it’s an ambush. The Pinkerton guys stand up in the window suddenly, out of the blue—”