What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy (19 page)

“Sammy Cash again,” he said, “though most people don’t realize it. He’d been through a lot by then, he’d changed. This clip may be all that’s left—all I’ve ever seen, at any rate. But the film’s a legend. Any serious collector would trade his grandmother for a copy, throw in his firstborn.”

“Why?”

“You mean besides the fact that no one else has one.”

“Right.”

“Because it’s the most elusive movie ever made. There are still a few people around that claim to have seen it, but just as many insist no such film ever existed—that the whole thing’s a legend.”

He replaced the former cassette. A nude young woman looked in the mirror and saw there the tall, stooped man she’d previously been. She reached out to touch the mirror but, unaccustomed to her new body, reached too hard. The mirror broke.

“
The Giving.
Interesting enough in itself, from what we know. But infinitely more interesting as the last legendary film of a legendary director. You need another beer?”

I told him I was fine. Sipped from my can to demonstrate.

“The director is almost as elusive. Supposedly started out as a studio salesman, flogging film bookings to small theatres all over the Southwest. In the only interview he ever gave, he said he made the mistake one day of actually watching one of the things he was selling and knew he could do a lot better. He sold his Cadillac, sank the money he got into putting together a movie. Friends and neighbors and his barely covered girlfriend served as actors in that first one. He shot it over a weekend, and when on Monday, driving a borrowed car, he went back out on the road, that was the one he worked hardest to sell.

“Took studio folk a time to cotton to what was going on, even with bookings starting to fall off all through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. By then he’d put away enough money to make another movie. Four more actually. When studio folk finally caught up with him to fire him, he was coming off the plane from two weeks in Mexico with his girlfriend and actors he’d scrounged from local colleges and had those four new films in the can.

“He was like a lot of natural artists, told the same story over and over. Always a dance between this detective hero and his nemesis. At first the nemesis was nothing more than a cardboard character, a threat, a blank, a cipher. But as time went on, movie to movie, he began to become real. In some of the movies he had extraordinary powers. In others he was seen only as a shadow, or as a presence registered by others. Remember, the director was cranking these out in a week or less. Pouring them directly from his soul onto celluloid, as one critic put it.

“Then, suddenly, they stopped. A year went by. Finally— rumor or legend has it—his swan song:
The Giving.
This great mystery movie. There are half a dozen Web sites devoted to his work.”

“Can’t help but notice you’ve avoided the director’s name.”

“I haven’t. No one knows it. The movies were all brought out as ‘A BR Film.’ No separate director’s credit. Just the two letters, no periods after.”

I stood, thanking him for his time.

“You want, I could skate around a bit on those Web sites, get e-mails off to my contacts, see what turns up.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

He tried drinking again from the empty can. “Done, then. I’ll be in touch.”

I almost stepped on the hairless cat who in lieu of giving up, had decided to outwait me and, when I moved, throw itself bodily in my path. As I tried to regain balance my hand went down hard on the couch. A floorboard near one leg cracked, descending like a ramp into darkness. Such was the unworldly ambience of that place, I wouldn’t have been unduly surprised if a line of tiny men with backpacks had come hiking up the tilted floorboard.

“Mr. Turner?”

Yes?

“Sammy Cash, the actor? And whoever it was made the movies? Some think they’re the same person.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

ONE OF THE LAST CLIENTS
I had was a man who had mutilated his eight-month-old son. He’d been two years in the state hospital, where things predictably enough had not gone well for him, and came to me on six years’ probation, with weekly counseling sessions mandated by the court. I got calls from his PO every Friday afternoon.

Affable, relaxed and clear-eyed, he was never able to explain why he’d done it. Once or twice as we spoke, without warning he’d fall into a kind of chant: “Thursday, thumb. First finger, Friday. Second, Saturday. Third, Tuesday. Fourth, Friday.” He seemed to me then like someone trying to express abstract concepts in a language he barely understood. He seemed, in fact, like another person entirely—not at all the quiet young man in chinos and T-shirt who weekly sat across from me chatting.

That’s facile, of course. Though hardly more facile than much else I found myself saying again and again to clients back then in the guise of observation, advice, counsel, supposed compassion. Conversational psychiatry has a shamefully limited vocabulary, pitifully few conjugations.

“I just want to get in touch with my wife, my son,” Brian would say. “I just want to tell them . . .”

“What do you want to tell them?” I’d finally ask.

“That . . .”

“What?”

“. . . I don’t know.”

My apartment was across from a charter school. Through the window Brian’s eyes tracked young women in plaid skirts, high white socks and Perma-Prest white shirts, young men in blazers, gray trousers, striped ties. Eventually I’d pour coffee, mine black, his with two sugars. We’d sit quietly then, comfortable in one another’s company, two citizens of the world sidestepping it for a moment though both of us had important work to get back to, at rest and at leisure on time’s front porch.

We’d been meeting for maybe three months, Brian having never missed a session, when one afternoon I got a call from him. Calls like that don’t bode well. Generally they mean someone is cracking up, someone’s found him-or herself in deep shit, someone needs a stronger crutch or more often a wrecker service. Brian just wanted to know if I’d be interested in taking in a movie, maybe grab some dinner after.

I couldn’t think why not—aside from the covenant against therapists consorting with patients, that is.

I’ve no idea what movie we saw. I’ve since put in time at the library looking through files of that day’s newspapers. None of those listed rings a bell.

Afterwards we passed on to an Italian restaurant. This part I do remember. Sort of family place where older kids waited table, all the younger kids and Mom were back in the kitchen, and Dad might come sidling up to your table any moment with an accordion or his vocal rendition of “Santa Lucia.” Tonight, though, the villa was quiet. Baskets of bread, antipasto, soup, pasta, entrées, dessert and coffee arrived. Both of us turning aside repeated offers of wine.

I can’t recall what we talked about any more than I remember the movie, but talk we did, before, during and after, more or less nonstop. Well past midnight outside a jazz bar on Beale I put Brian in a cab.

That was Tuesday. When Brian didn’t show up for his Thursday session, I tried calling. When his PO checked in on Friday, I told him about the no-show. We sent a patrol around.

The PO called back a couple of hours later. I was home by then, changed into jeans and T-shirt, bottle of merlot recorked and in the fridge, fair portion of it in the deep-bellied glass before me. Hummingbirds jockeyed for position at the feeder out on my balcony.

Apparently Brian had gone directly home that night and hung himself. Was this what he’d intended all along? Responding officers said a Billie Holiday CD played over and over. He’d made a pot of coffee and drunk half of it as he undressed and got things together. Under his cup was a page torn from a stenographer’s pad.

Wonderful evening
, it said.
Thank you
.

Mild weather tomorrow, the radio promised. A beautiful day. High in the sixties, fair to partly cloudy. But when I woke, wind whistled at my windows and rain blew against them, forming new maps of the world as it dripped down.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“I’M NOT SURE THAT’S POSSIBLE.”

“Of course it is. I just need a bench warrant.”

“To intercept the mayor’s mail.”

“Only to log it. I wouldn’t be reading it.”

“Judge Heslep’s the one you’d have to see, then.”

“Fair enough.”

“Forget that. Man has a picture of Nixon and Hoover shaking hands in his office, no way he’s going to issue the warrant. You consider just asking?”

“Asking?”

The sheriff shook his head, picked up the phone and dialed.

“Henry Lee? You playing hooky today or what? Taxpayers don’t pay you to sit ’round watching
Matlock
. . . . Good point, we
don’t
pay you, do we? And let me be the first to say you’re worth every last damn penny. . . . Good, good. . . . Got a question for you. Any problem with our looking over your mail for, oh, say the last couple months? . . . Well, sure, but whatever you still have at hand. Anything like me, most of it’s still in a pile somewhere. . . . Good man. . . . See you then.

“Clear your dance card. Five o’clock at the mayor’s,” Bates said, hanging up, “for cocktails.” When had I last heard someone use the word
cocktails?
“He’ll have copies of mail, payment records—whatever he’s able to pull together. Said you should feel free to bring a friend.”

“I assume you’re coming with.”

“I kind of got the impression he had Val Bjorn in mind.”

“Not Sarah Hazelwood?”

“Hey. It’s a small town. Sneeze, and someone down the road reaches for Kleenex.”

“How’s June?” I asked. She hadn’t shown up for work.

“She’s all right. Told me you know what’s going on.”

“Good that the two of you talked about it.”

“She’s out looking for the son of a bitch, Turner. You have any idea how hard it is for me to stay out of this?”

“I do, believe me.”

“Our kids, what we want for them. . . . She’s a smart girl. She’ll work it out. By the way, Henry told me I should tell you you’re a pain in the ass. He also says we’re glad to have you here.”

Framed in the parentheses of cupped hands, a face appeared at the window. One of the hands turned to a wave. That or its mate opened the door, and a short, stocky man clambered in. He wore dark, badly wrinkled slacks, white shirt with open collar, gray windbreaker. Somehow when he removed the canvas golf cap, you expected him to look inside to see if his hair might have gone along. Wasn’t on his head anymore.

“They’re at it again,” he told the sheriff.

“What
they
we talking about this time, Jay?”

“Gypsies. Who else would I be talking about?”

“Well now, as I recall, last time you came by, it was a busload of Mexicans being trucked in to pick crops. Time before that, it was a carload of ‘city kids.’”

“Gypsies,” the man said.

“They haven’t put a curse on you, I hope?”

“A curse? Don’t play with me, Lonnie. Ain’t no such thing as curses.”

“So what are the gypsies up to, then? Stealing?”

“You bet they are.”

“Which is what everyone says about them, same way they talk about curses. But the stealing’s real?”

“Yep.”

“You saw it?”

“Family of ’em came in to buy groceries. Afterwards, things turned up missing.”

“What kind of things?”

“Couple of Tonka trucks, a doll.”

“Family had children with them?”

“Course they did.”

“You ever been known to pocket a thing or two you didn’t pay for when you were little, Jay? Kids do that all the time. Hell,
I
did. . . . Tell you what. You bring me a list of what’s missing, I’ll go talk to them. Bet your goods’ll be back on the shelf before the day’s over.”

“Well . . . okay, Lonnie. If you say so.”

“I’ll swing by and pick up that list on my way, say half an hour?”

“It’ll be ready.”

“Hard not to miss the excitement of law enforcement, huh, Turner?” the sheriff said once he was gone.

“Oh yeah.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, just what is it you do all day out there by the lake?”

“Not a lot. That’s pretty much the idea. Read, put some food on the back of the stove for later, sit on the porch.”

“What I hear, you earned it. Peace, I mean. Sorry we dragged you away, into all this.”

“Some ways, I am too.”

This, I thought—this was part of what I valued here, sitting quietly, no one afraid of silence.

“Just between the two of us,” I said after a while, “I’m not sure I was coming into my own out there, not sure I ever would. Maybe all I was doing was fading away.”

Bates nodded, then dropped his boots off the desk and stood.

“Let’s go see the king,” he said.