Bloody River Blues: A Location Scout Mystery (23 page)

When the detectives had turned the corner, Crimmins walked along the street, away from the phone booth, motioning Joshua after him. When the bodyguard caught up with him, there was a crown of sweat on Crimmins’s forehead and his face was white. These were not the symptoms of physical exertion.

“Find me Stettle,” Crimmins growled in a furious whisper. “I don’t care where he is, what he’s doing. I want him now.”

THE RIVER WAS
muddy today.

The water seemed no more turbulent than on any other day—the wind was brisk but it still hadn’t broken the surface into whitecaps. But some disturbance was churning up clayish mud and staining the wide water from shore to shore.

John Pellam stretched out in the driver’s seat of the camper and tried Nina’s number once more. Her machine answered and he hung up without leaving a message. They had had a brief conversation earlier during which she assured him she was fine. She simply wanted rest. Could he call the head of Makeup and explain? . . . Of course he would. Was there anything else he could do? Did she want company? No, she’d visited her mother at the hospital and asked the
woman’s doctor for a couple of Valium for herself. Pellam could hear the slurred words and he hung up to let her get some sleep.

He had just now replaced the phone when a very distraught Tony Sloan called and said the final shoot was about to go down. Pellam knew this and had planned on attending. What was ominous was that Sloan had summoned him so adamantly. He couldn’t possibly be thinking of new locations, could he? The key grip had let slip the information that Sloan had fifteen straight days of film—that was
twenty-four-hour
days of celluloid—to boil down into a 125-minute movie. Pellam, thanking the Lord he was not Sloan’s film editor, promised he would be there before the last blank gun shot was fired. He stood up and adjusted his Abel Gance
Napoleon
poster, the only decoration in the camper. He slipped the Colt into the inside pocket of his bomber jacket and was about to leave when his phone buzzed again.

“Nina?” he asked.

“Are you sitting down?” The voice was a man’s.

“Hello?”

“Sitting down?”

“I can hardly hear you, Marty. Where are you?”

“I’m in Berlin.”

Pellam pressed the cellular phone hard into his ear, as if that might improve the connection from the state of Missouri, in which Winston Churchill coined the term
Iron Curtain,
to the place that had once been behind it.

“I tried to get you in London and Paris,” Pellam shouted. “Look, I’m sorry about the other night.”

“You don’t have to shout. You break up when you shout. I can hear you fine. What?”

“I’m sorry I missed you. I had an accident.”

“Well, it was a damn expensive accident. Telorian
was
interested but he got pissed because you blew him off a second time. What’s the trouble, John, some Freudian thing against Iranians? Excuse me, Persians. You should’ve called. Are you sitting down?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve got some Hungarian money lined up.”

“What?”

“I know. It’s weird. Paramount balked at the last minute on the terrorist script. It’s
totally
cratered. So it’s a green light for
Central Standard Time.
This guy in London put me in touch with these investors in Budapest. They’re a real East Village duo. Young guys. I pitched you sort of as a Jarmusch.”

Hungarians financing a cult film noir flick set in Wisconsin. So this was the New World Order.

“Well, I’m happy about that, Marty. What do we do now?”

“You can get a hundred fifty?”

“If I hustle.”

Before the feds start tap-dancing on my accounts.

“Well, hustle, boy.”

“They understand I’m directing?”

“They’re all for it. They know all about you, John . . . It’s not a problem.” His voice filled with transatlantic sincerity. “You know what I’m saying?”

The death of Tommy Bernstein was what he was saying.

“They like your work. They like you. Or who they
think
you are. Don’t disappoint them.”

“Who are these guys?”

“Their names, you mean? Unpronounceable. Funny marks over the letters. Who cares? Get your money. I’m having my shyster in New York put together the partnership agreement. Let’s try to sign it up by the first of the month. Is it doable?”

“It’s doable. It’s very doable . . . Listen, Marty . . . thanks. You know what this means to me.”

The broken connection mercifully cut short the gratitude and Pellam found the conversation was over.

Outside he kicked a piece of dried mud off his Noconas and walked to the Yamaha.

“WE SAW YOUR
advisory about the assault on that Sassower woman.”

Ronald Peterson cocked an eyebrow at Bob Gianno.
And?

“We talked to Crimmins.”

Neither of the Maddox cops noticed Peterson’s eyes flick with minute satisfaction toward Nelson, who could not restrain the less subtle smile.

Hagedorn continued, “He denied having anything to do with the assault, of course. What did you expect?”

What indeed?

“But naturally we didn’t care about that. We just wanted to flush him. We mentioned Pellam’s name. We pretended it was a slip. You should have seen his eyes.”

Peterson said, “That was a clever move.”

“We thought so. He’ll do something now. Either try to hit Pellam directly or just spook him. Either way, we’ll move on him.”

They sat in Peterson’s office. The cops had noticed the toy collection and each seemed to be trying to think of something witty to say about it and came up
blank. Peterson was oh so happy with their immense discomfort.

“Keeping the pressure on Pellam. That’s good.” Peterson took a long moment to read a low-priority report that had nothing to do with this meeting. He dashed a note in the margin and dropped it on the desk. “You know Pellam did time.”

“What?” Hagedorn laughed.

“Manslaughter. San Quentin.”

“Damn. San Quentin,” Gianno said. “Hard time. How ’bout that.”

Peterson watched the local detectives stew a bit as they were poked by guilt that they themselves hadn’t unearthed this information. He asked, “Can you use that?” He himself had considered Pellam’s criminal record and concluded that local police couldn’t do much with it.

Hagedorn and Gianno looked at each other. The blond, good-looking cop—more handsome than most of the FBI agents who worked for Peterson—lifted his hands and scrunched his lips together in reflection. Finally he said, “I don’t see how. Film permits are already issued. I mean, I don’t think a prior conviction has any bearing on that. But what about parole?”

“Parole?”

Hagedorn continued, “Did he break parole by leaving the state?”

This was something Peterson had not thought of. A microscopic frown crossed his brow. Being outthought by this smarmy shit-town cop. Peterson decided that Nelson would twist in the wind a few revolutions for missing this. “Given the dates of the crime and his traveling-man career, I doubt that’s an
issue but I’ll have my associate check into it. Now, I think we’ve agreed that Crimmins knows Pellam reported him for the assault on the girl, and—thanks to the clever thinking of our friends from Maddox here—he may make some overt move against Pellam. We’ll monitor that. But I think we need to step up the pressure too.”

“Any ideas?” Gianno asked glumly, suspecting sarcasm but unable to identify it.

Peterson responded, “I have one, yes. Two of my agents were on the movie set the other day and they found something interesting. I’d like to ask them to stop by and tell us about it.”

MISSOURI RIVER BLUES

SCENE 179E—EXTERIOR DAY—ROAD BETWEEN FIELD AND RIVER

This is a narrow road between the field and the river. There is a small, one-story CHURCH on the river side road, surrounded by BUSHES and TREES. Past the bushes the road continues through the field, open space on either side.

MEDIUM ANGLES of ROSS’S PACKARD parked fifty feet past the church. DEHLIA dabs FAKE BLOOD on her forehead and stretches out in the front seat of the car with the door open. Ross and the three GANG MEMBERS take their MACHINE GUNS and hide in the bushes, waiting for the armored truck. Ross stops and runs back to Dehlia. He gives her his FAVORITE PISTOL.

ROSS

In a half hour, little love, we’re gonna be across that river and we’re gonna be free.

DEHLIA

If anything happens . . .

TWO SHOT of Ross touching his finger to her lips to shush her. They KISS long and then he stands up, cocks the MACHINE GUN, and runs to the bushes.

“Finale time, everybody! Let’s try to bring it in under a hundred takes.” Tony Sloan took his position, standing in the shadow of a big thirteen-ton Chapman Titan motorized crane. He surveyed the battlefield to be.

Sloan, the second-unit director, the DP, the ever-nervous ponytailed assistant director and the stunt coordinator had just finished trooping through the weeds and grass and scrabbling over the revetment of stone down to the yellowish water, blocking out the climax of the movie. This was the armored truck attack. The owners of the transport company, tipped that the truck would be hit by Ross’s gang, had replaced the shipment of cash with bags of cut-up newspaper and substituted Pinkerton agents for the regular guards. Dehlia would be reclining, supposedly injured, helpless and beautiful at the scene of the fake car accident, bringing the armored car to a stop.

But before Ross could slip a smoke grenade into one of the truck’s gunports, the guards were to come out blazing. Pious citizens, just leaving a church at the
wrong moment, became pious victims as they walked into the middle of the carnage. Ross and Dehlia would then escape. But they would drive only a half mile down the road before a young boy—whose father Ross had accidentally killed fifty scenes before—darted in front of them. Ross would swerve and the car would sail into the river. (Pellam had suggested they rename the film
The Postman Always Rings Twice for the Wild Bunch
.)

More than one hundred crew members and thirty actors and extras tested lights, oiled dollies, adjusted hydraulic lifts, plugged in cables, mounted film magazines, prefocused cameras, took light readings, positioned microphones and read and reread scripts.

But the man of the moment was none of these. Nor was he the lean, wild-haired director of photography or even Tony Sloan himself.

The center of this afternoon’s particular universe was a thin, balding fifty-one-year-old man of quiet demeanor, wearing neither period costume nor Hollywood chic but dark polyester slacks, a neatly pressed blue dress shirt and penny loafers.

There was a delicacy about Henry Stacey, known both here and in Hollywood only by his nickname, Stace. His careful eyes scanned the set in front of him with the attention of a seasoned cinematographer. His job was in fact considerably less artistic although it was—in the mind of directors like Tony Sloan (and most of Sloan’s fans)—far more important than the director of photography’s.

Stace was the company’s arms master.

The actors and actresses in
Missouri River Blues
had so far fired close to seventy thousand rounds of
blank ammunition at each other, which probably far exceeded the total number of live rounds fired by all the real-life crooks and law enforcers in the Show Me State since it joined the Union.

The arms and prop assistants had been working since four that morning, supervising the loading of an armory’s worth of submachine guns, rifles, and pistols for the final scene. Stace himself oversaw the loading of every weapon to make certain that no live ammunition accidentally got mixed into the magazines.

He also had worked with the unit director and his assistants to oversee the placing of hundreds of impact squibs—tiny electrically detonated firecrackers—whose explosions would resemble striking bullets. He did the same with wardrobe and makeup to rig the blood bladders on the bodies of actors destined to be wounded or killed in the shoot (and who stood with great discomfort as they, unprotected, were wired up by assistants who wore thick gloves and safety goggles). The squibs were connected to a computerized control panel and could be triggered either by an operator or, with additional rigging, by the trigger action of the gun that was supposedly firing the bullets whose impact the squibs represented.

Stace and his crew also rigged debris mortars and vaporized gasoline bombs for the shots in which the mock-ups of the antique cars exploded. Reminding actors and actresses to stuff their ears with flesh-colored cotton before the filming was another part of the job as was instructing them how to work the guns, how to stand when they fired and reminding them to provide the gun-bucking recoil that occurs only with live ammunition. He had running battles with Sloan (as he
did with all directors) because he urged the actors to point the muzzles slightly away from their victims for safety, while the directors, for the sake of authenticity, wanted guns aimed directly at their targets.

A competitive and award-winning pistol marksman, Stace was also the set rifleman—occasionally manning his own bolt-action .380, or M-16 automatic, to fire wax bullets for impact effects on surfaces that couldn’t be rigged with squibs—windows, water, or even, if they volunteered, a stuntman’s bare flesh.

The final scene in
Missouri River
would involve the firing of five thousand rounds in several setups. Once the medium- and long-angle shooting was finished, the rigging would be done once more for the close-up and two-shot angles. This was going to be a long day. The exhausted key grip looked over the prep work, then at his watch. “Man, we’ll be fighting the light on this one.” Meaning working until dusk.

“Are we ready?” Sloan shouted through his megaphone.

Various crew members, not knowing whether or not they were the subject of this inquiry, assured him that they were.

Stace checked the location of every weapon, noting it on a clipboard, and walked back to the fiberboard table on which was the squib control board. Three of his assistants sat like puppeteers, both hands above rows of buttons. Because the scene was newly added to the script and was so elaborate, there had been no time to rig the guns themselves to fire the squibs. The young assistants—two men and a woman—would use their judgment in deciding where the machine-gun bullets would land and push the corresponding buttons.