Shallow Graves Read online

He said, "The way you carry yourself… I don't know. Just an impression."

  He felt she wanted to warm up, but was keeping the tone conversational. "I lived in Manhattan for a while. I did some fashion work. But I was too short to get good assignments. I didn't like it anyway." She folded her arm across her chest and looked for the door, seemed relieved that it was only six feet away. "Why are you asking me these questions?"

  "I always like to find out from the locals about locations I'm scouting. It's-"

  "Locals?" She tromped hard on the frown, but some of it escaped.

  He said, "I get the feeling you've lived here long enough to give me an idea of what Cleary's really like."

  Meg was grimacing. Whatever was behind the visit-Pellam didn't have a clue what that might be-wasn't working out. On cue, she looked at her watch. "I should go. There's someone covering for me at the office."

  "When I get out of here-they're paroling me tomorrow-let me buy you lunch."

  "No, I-"

  "Not to worry," Pellam said. "I'll drive."

  "Uh, I don't think that's a very good idea. I've got a lot going on. I'm very busy."

  "People are busy in Cleary?"

  Okay, it was a little over the line with that one. He'd forgotten you have to be real careful when you hit people in their home towns. Especially if you're from one that's a thousand times bigger than theirs. But come on, country folk, you gotta have a sense of humor.

  She bristled. "Yes, people are busy in Cleary. There's more to this town than people like you'll ever see-"

  "There, perfect," Pellam announced.

  She frowned.

  "Keep talking. You're giving me a feel for the place. That's just what I'm looking for."

  "I should go."

  He said, "No, you shouldn't."

  "Anyway, I'm not a local. I've only lived here for-"

  "Don't tell me, let me guess…" Pellam was feeling perverse (hell, why not? She'd run him over). "Ten years."

  Her eyes flared. "What makes you think I've lived here that long?"

  In for a penny, in for a pound.

  "The makeup, the hair, the clothes-"

  "What's wrong with-?" Her voice was high, indignant.

  "Nothing. You just asked me-"

  "Never mind." Meg unfolded her arms and walked to the door.

  Pellam asked, "So when can we get together?"

  "The word never comes to mind." She stepped through the doorway, gripping the knob hard then must've decided she shouldn't be slamming clinic doors and closed it silently. A second later it opened and she said to him, "And for your information, I've lived here for five years, not ten."

  The door closed again, harder this time.

  Ah, she'll be back.

  Pellam heard her low heels tapping on the linoleum, then the grind of the front door and then nothing.

  She'll be back. She's on her way now.

  A car started.

  She'll be back.

  He heard a car strew gravel as it hit the road, then the whine of gears.

  Okay, maybe not.

  Bzzzzt.

  Marty stuffed the moist square of the Polaroid into his pocket and squinted as he looked at a bald spot on the small mountain across a ravine. Acid rain'd eaten away at a lot of the greenery. It didn't look good at all. By the time Marty'd gone to college, schools were offering degrees in the environment. Marty could recognize acid rain.

  He took four pictures, numbered them and slipped them into his pocket. All location scouts he knew used Polaroids, but Marty was an amateur photographer and would've preferred to use his old Nikkormat 35mm. The variation in the lenses-wide angle, telephoto-would give a better idea of what the scenery and locations looked like through the Panaflex movie camera. But the studio paid his salary and the studio said 'Roids.

  So 'Roids were what they were going to get.

  Marty wanted to be a cinematographer eventually. He knew cameras. He liked the murmuring gears and heavy, oil-scented parts that fit together so well. He liked the perfectly ground disks of the Schneider lenses, set into their royal-blue velvet carrying cases. He liked the portable Arriflex 35mm cameras, which cameramen would carry around on sets like rocket launchers. He liked the robotic contraption of Steadicams.

  He figured a couple more years of location scouting, then it would be about time for his break (a unit director would call out, "Holy Mother, the director of photography's on a bender-you, kid, get behind the Panaflex. Roll, roll, roll…") Until that happened, however, being a location scout would do. Especially being a location scout for John Pellam, where you tended to get a week of experience in the movie business for every day you worked.

  Marty wandered back down the hill toward the rented Tempo.

  Get the feel.

  Marty worked hard at trying to get the feel. Pellam made him read the scripts over and over. Scripts are a bitch to read but he kept at it. Pellam would question him about a story. You gotta get the feel for it, he'd say.

  The feel… that was the extra ten percent that Pellam-for all his bullshit and fire-me-if-you-want attitude-was always talking about. The ten percent that Pellam delivered. This was the essential lesson Marty had learned from John Pellam.

  The day was getting hot. The sun was out. Marty looked at his watch. There were still thirteen locations he had to find but sun like this was too good to miss. Beer break. Marty went to the trunk of the car and took out a Miller. He opened it. He sat on the rear bumper as he flipped through the script for Shallow Grave. He unbuttoned his shirt and let the sunlight fall on his tanned, skinny chest.

  He liked sitting in the sun and drinking beer. He liked the country, liked the blond dry grass that hissed when he walked through it. When he was in California he usually stayed in a condo in Van Nuys, but he preferred to travel because there were no seasons in L.A. He loved fall. He wondered if there were more jobs for cinematographers in New York than in L.A.

  He wondered-

  The bullet hit the back of the car with a huge ringing slap a full second before he heard the rolling boom of the rifle shot. Marty jumped up, eyes wide, dropping the script, the camera and his beer. White, malty foam shot out of the gold can.

  "Christ," he whispered as terror and relief oozed through his legs. All he could do was stare, openmouthed, at the hole in the car, remembering a newspaper story about a woman who was killed by a gunshot from several miles away, a hunting accident. "Christ."

  He thought: that'd been four feet to the right…

  The second shot, which he never heard, wasn't four feet to the right at all. It hit the gas tank pretty much dead center.

  You could hear, as if on a soundtrack, a huge whoosh, as the flaming ball spread twenty feet in all directions.

  You could hear Marty's horrific scream from the tangle of fire.

  And, as the Ford burned into black metal, you could hear the honking of geese and swans, fleeing with their imperfect memory of the terrible explosion.

  4

  At first, Pellam thought the tragedy was his. Leukemia. A tumor. Hodgkin's.

  I'm sorry, sir. The X ray showed something else.

  The doctor opened the door slowly. Pellam looked at the man's face and knew something bad was coming. The man sure had the technique down. Pellam had used it himself. When his father had died he'd been elected to break the news to a lot of people. He let the downcast eyes and endless loop of a sigh explain to them that terrible news was impending, before he said a word. The telepathic message of tragedy did a lot of the work for him.

  Pellam saw this same expression in the eyes of the strong, young vet of a doctor, pausing in the doorway, looking at Pellam as if he were gazing at the last few seconds of his patient's good health.

  "Evening," Pellam said.

  Then he saw the deputy, a young man, similar in build to the doctor, baby-faced, crewcut, and he thought-his first fleeting thought-someone had stolen the camper. But their eyes explained too much. And at that moment, Pellam understood.

/>   "Marty?"

  The doctor looked at the deputy, who nodded.

  He asked, "An accident?"

  The deputy said, "I'm sorry, sir."

  "What happened?" Pellam found himself breathless. The air had actually escaped from his lungs.

  The deputy said, "His car caught fire. I'm sorry to have to tell you he was killed."

  "Oh, God." Pellam closed his eyes. He felt an overwhelming, raw sense of loss. Images of the boy flipped through Pellam's head. Like still pictures. That was one thing about himself he'd always thought odd. For someone who worked in film, his memories were always static. Kodacolor snapshots. They never moved.

  "Oh, God…" His voice faded. Suddenly, he thought of all the things he'd have to do. Who should he call? What should he say? There'd be hours of the grim, official business that he'd have to handle. Pellam, surrogate father to this poor young man. "What happened? A crash?"

  The deputy, a boy not much older than Marty, but with that vest of self-assurance most cops seem to wear, said, "Truth be told, sir, appears he was doing some drugs. We found pot and some crack cocaine vials. He-"

  "Crack? Marty? No, no, no…"

  "We found the body next to the gas tank. We think some grass caught fire and he tried to put it out. Before he could, she blew up."

  "He didn't do crack."

  "Well, sir, I should tell you too that we got a call just before it happened. Couple men said they'd seen him selling some pot to a local boy. They-"

  "No," Pellam spat out. "Impossible."

  "They described the car pretty good, sir."

  "Who was it? Who reported it?"

  "An anonymous call. There was a foil package with a goodly bit of grass in it. And some crack. It was in the car. The glove compartment. It wasn't all burnt up."

  Pellam lifted his hands to his face. He wondered if he was going to cry. He'd cried twice in the past ten years. Once was just after the funeral of a friend. The second time was when his ex had left. He'd been drank on both occasions. He was sober now and he didn't think he was going to cry.

  "If it's any consolation," the deputy said, "the coroner said it was fast." He looked at the doctor for confirmation that a fast death was better than a slow one.

  The doctor handed him a paper cup. Inside were two pills, tiny white pills.

  "They'll help you sleep."

  Pellam shook his head but he didn't hand them back. He held the cup in both hands and stared at the two dots of pills, studying them carefully, noting the way the light, muted by the side of the paper cup, fell on them, how they were perfectly symmetrical, how they rested against each other-a kind of infinity symbol in three dimensions.

  What Pellam couldn't tell them was: one of the things he was feeling was fury. He'd been after Marty for months to give up the pot. Pellam had done his share of controlled substances in his day, but had been shocked to find that Marty had smuggled a few nickel bags into Mexico.

  When Pellam had found them, he'd pulled the boy from bed, pinning him to the cold metallic sides of the camper just before dawn, demanding to know where the rest of the stash was. He owned up and handed it over to Pellam, who threw it out. Marty promised he'd abstain while they were driving together.

  Would the boy have gone back on his word?

  And crack? He'd never even mentioned that.

  "Uhm, what?-" Pellam started to ask the deputy but his thoughts jammed. The men looked at him patiently. He remembered. "What should I do?"

  The doctor said, "You don't have to do anything at all but get some rest. I still don't want you out of bed till tomorrow."

  "But-"

  The young deputy held teardrop-shaped sunglasses with haze-cutting yellow lenses-right out of a sixties biker movie. The sincere, well-scrubbed man hooked a thumb into a leather mesh belt and said, "The coroner's doing his report right now; we've already called the young man's family. And your film studio."

  His family…

  Hello, Mrs Jacobs. You don't know me, but I worked with your son… The two of us, we got our asses thrown out of a whorehouse in Nogales about three weeks ago…

  The deputy continued, "We're making arrangements to ship the body back to Los Angeles. We figured you'd want to be traveling with him, sir, so we've booked you on the same flight. The local funeral home's agreed to transport the body to Albany airport. That'll be American Eagle flight 6733, day after tomorrow."

  "If he's well enough to travel," the doctor said.

  Your son, Mr Jacobs, was smoking a nugget of crack and got blown up…

  "Of course," the deputy said. "Sure." The man leaned forward and Pellam saw a roll of dense fat encroach over the black belt of his Sam Browne harness, Vaseline-shined patent leather. The deputy said, "I don't like, you know, drugs much, sir. Especially if he was into selling them to some of our young people. But I'm truly sorry about your friend. What happened, wasn't fair. All outa proportion, you know what I mean?"

  The man's battleship-gray eyes were tight with sorrow and Pellam thanked him. He looked again at the pills. The cup wasn't waxed and he found that his sweat had left fingerprints on the sides.

  The doctor said, "Take those now. You need rest."

  Pellam couldn't speak. He nodded.

  "We'll leave you alone. You want some company or anything, my wife and I live a hundred yards up the road. There'll be someone here all night, a nurse. Just tell her and she'll get me."

  "Thanks."

  The men left the room. Pellam set the cup on the tabletop. He misjudged the distance and it hit the edge and fell to the floor. He heard one, or maybe both of the pills, rolling somewhere, endlessly. He didn't even look down. He lay back in bed and stared at the ceiling as the dusk turned into night and finally he slept.

  The noise.

  Sitting in the Winnebago, Pellam remembered the way the boy would sit sideways in the camper's small bunk and swing his Adidas back and forth. The thud-thud, pause, thud-thud. A monotonous heartbeat.

  God, it was quiet. Pellam cocked his head and couldn't hear a thing. A hum, but that was in his head. (Well, he heard Marty's voice and his laugh and the fake heartbeat of his boots but those were in his head too.) No airplane drone, no diesels. No children whooping as they played. Pellam sat in the driver's seat of the camper, looking back into the living quarters. The pain in his back was less when he sat upright. Standing was agony, unless he leaned. For some reason when he moved the pain wasn't as bad as standing still.

  Ah, Marty…

  He stood up. The tragedy tired him out more than the injuries did. He walked stiffly. He'd refused the cane the doctor recommended. There was a black scab on his head and the bruise now had some green in it.

  While he still had the courage, he filled a Macy's shopping bag with the boy's belongings. He rested, sitting on the bunk in the camper, looking at the bag for a few minutes, the big brown-red logo, the white, spidery wrinkles. Pellam stood, emptied the bag and packed the contents back into his own leather suitcase, which he'd bought on Rodeo Drive eight years before, folding the boy's shirts and jeans and Jockey shorts as careful as if he were doing piece cleaning in a Beverly Hills laundry.

  Then he sat and studied the suitcase for a half hour.

  After he'd been released from the clinic a few hours before, the first thing he'd done was shave. He'd passed a mirror, and his face, with the uneven beard laced with gray, had shocked him. He looked like he was a badly abused 50. Then he'd called Marty's father. It had not been a good conversation. The man, a retired studio gaffer, blamed Pellam. He wasn't contemptuous, he wasn't snide, but throughout the conversation, Pellam could hear the pedal tone of suspicion-as if Pellam had supplied the drugs that had killed his son. Pellam wondered what the man looked like, what his house was like, what his relationship with Marty had been. The boy had complained about his parents a lot but most of the examples the boy cited made Pellam think: And the problem is what exactly? Marty bitched about the time they took away car privileges for a month after he'd passed out
drunk in a HoJo's off the Eden's Expressway. And the time they made him go to a counselor when he went through a spell of cutting classes.

  All high school stuff-bitching and moaning. Pellam also asked to speak to Marty's mother. He felt a wave of relief when the boy's father said that wouldn't be a good idea. Then he'd hung up and lain back in the camper cot.

  He clicked the heavy brass latches back and forth. The suitcase had cost him a thousand dollars.

  Pellam felt the bottle of Demerol in his pocket, took it out and tossed it into one of the kitchen drawers. He needed something different. He slowly crouched down and reached into a cabinet. Out came a bottle of mescal, a quarter full, with a bloated white worm in the bottom. Pellam poured a double shot and drank the liquid down in two swallows. He coughed and felt the crackling wave from his chest up to his face and the nearly instantaneous deflating of the pain. He poured one more, smaller, and again began the slow crouch to replace the bottle. He set it in the back of the cabinet but it landed on something and fell forward. The loose cork stopper fell out and a quarter cup of liquor spilled out before he could snatch the bottle up again. "Damn." He managed to save the worm. Pellam reached in the back and felt for what the bottle had landed on. It was soft and crunched. He jerked his hand back, thinking: Rat, mouse…

  He looked. Just a Baggie. He reached in and pulled it out. Filled with Marty's stash. He looked at it for a long moment then wrapped it in paper towels, which he soaked under the low-pressure water tap and wadded up. This he dropped into a brown paper bag, crumpled that up and then stepped outside and tossed the whole thing into a refuse basket.

  Pellam hefted the suitcase, wheezing painfully from the effort, and left the camper. He walked stiffly through the cold autumn sunlight to the Greyhound depot, which took up a small portion of a gas station on Main Street. He paid to have the bag shipped to Marty's parents.

  The clerk stroked the leather. "That's a fine suitcase."

  "Yessir," Pellam said, and as it joined other luggage on a baggage cart, walked listlessly outside.

  He was reminded of the last time he went hunting with his father-in his hometown, Simmons, New York, probably no more than sixty or seventy miles from where he now stood.