Bloody River Blues Read online

  "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-"

  Pellam began to say something.

  "Will you stop with that Bonnie and Clyde shit already, Pellam?" Sloan snapped. "This'll be different.

  Everybody thinks they're going to get shot-I mean, the audience is thinking Bonnie and Clyde. They're thinking they've seen this before. But uh-uh. Here, the lads get away. Maybe the guns don't go off and-"

  Danny said, "Neither of the guns go off? There are two agents."

  "Well, one gun jams and the other guy misses."

  "So now you want them to live?" Danny asked brightly.

  "No, no, no. I want them to escape then get killed, maybe in a freak accident. I've got it! They drive into a train."

  The actress said, "If I don't get shot again I don't mind."

  Pellam said, "Somebody else did a train crash ending. Who was it? That's very seventies. Elliott Gould might've driven a car into a train once. Or Donald Sutherland. Sugarland Express" He wondered why he was getting so riled. Missouri River Blues wasn't his movie.

  The stoolie from the studio, a young man with curly hair not tied in a ponytail, lit a cigarette and said to no one in particular, "You know what it costs to rent a train?"

  Sloan started to speak, then reconsidered. He said, "I could go with a tractor-trailer maybe."

  Pellam said, "Why don't you rename the film and call it Daughter of Bonnie and Son of Clyde?"

  Danny slapped Pellam's palm, five high.

  The director ignored them. "Daniel, rewrite it and let's get John a copy. I want it to look like they're going to get blasted but then something happens and they escape and there's a freak accident."

  Exasperated, Danny said, "What? What happens? Tell me. Give me a clue."

  The director said, "Surprise me. I want it like Man can't touch them, but Fate can. Fate or nature, or some shit." Pellam asked, "You want any particular land of road?"

  "A road…" His eyes began to fly again. "I want it near the river and I want a big field on one side. I want the car to careen into the river."

  The river. Pellam grimaced. It was often impossible to get permits for scenes like that nowadays-no one wanted gas and oil and random car parts filling up their bodies of water. Many of the car crash setups were guerrilla shots-without a permit, in and out before the authorities found out, the evidence left at the bottom of the river or lake. Pellam guessed that if Sloan insisted on launching Ross's Packard into the Missouri River, it would have to be a guerrilla shot.

  Sloan said, "I'm going to look at rushes." He hurried toward the door. Before he could leave, though, the sound of arguing voices rose from the hallway. A security guard was backed onto the set by two tall men in light gray suits. They walked steadily toward him, speaking low and pleasantly but insistently. One of the men looked at Pellam. He said-to his partner, "That's him." They turned from the flustered, red-faced guard and strode onto the set.

  "Hey, hey, hey," Sloan said. "What is this?"

  "John Pellam?"

  Before Pellam could answer, Sloan said impatiently, 'This is a closed set. You'll have to leave."

  One said in a high, contrite voice, "I'm sorry for the" intrusion. This won't take a moment." He turned to Pellam.

  "You're John Pellam?"

  "That's right."

  Sloan looked at Pellam with a mixture of perplexity and
anger in his face. "John, who are these guys? What's going on here?"

  Like the cops the day before, these men ignored Sloan and said to Pellam, "We're with the Federal Bureau of Investigation." IDs appeared.

  And like the day before, when the cops had shown up, everyone on the set stopped working and turned to watch.

  "I'm Special Agent Monroe and this is Special Agent Bracken. Would you mind stepping outside with us? We'd like to ask you a few questions." The agents ignored the bloody actress. Perhaps they had seen a lot of machine-gunned bodies in their day.

  "About what?"

  "A crime you may have been a witness to. If you have a few minutes now?"

  "I really don't."

  'Yessir," Bracken said. Monroe, with his razor-cut hair and tidy mustache, looked like an FBI agent. Bracken was scruffy and had a wrinkled suit. He looked like a thug. Maybe he worked undercover. "It won't take long."

  "He's very busy," Sloan said. "We're all very busy."

  Bracken spoke to Pellam, as if he had uttered this protest. "Well, sir, the thing is, if you continue not to cooperate we'll have to take you to St. Louis and-"

  Sloan strode over to them. "I don't know what this is all about, but you can't just walk in here. Go get a warrant or something. John, what the hell is going on here? What are they talking about?"

  "Well, we can get a warrant, sir. But that'll be to arrest Mr. Pellam here- "

  "For what?"

  "Contempt and obstruction of justice. Now, if that's how you'd like us to proceed…"

  "Jesus," Sloan whined, closing his eyes. He sounded more upset than Pellam. "Talk to them, John." He waved his hand fiercely as if scaring away a bee. "This is not a problem I want. You understand me?"

  "Maybe if we could just step outside, Mr. Pellam," Monroe said. "It shouldn't take long."

  Sloan lifted impatient eyebrows at Pellam and told the agents, "He'd be happy to."

  SEVEN

  Pellam preceded the two agents out of the house, past a row of location vans, dollies, and generator trucks, then down the street. They kept motioning him along the sidewalk, away from the curious eyes of the cast and crew and the crowd of locals, who stared with fascination at the equipment and occasionally waved-some timidly, some like relatives-at the cast.

  One middle-aged man pointed at Pellam and whispered something to the woman by his side. Their faces seemed to darken and they stared, unsmiling, as he walked out of sight behind a row of shaggy hedges. When he turned, as directed, into an alley between two empty houses he could glimpse the couple again. They still stared with apparent hostility, and several others had joined them.

  Halfway through the alley, which Pellam thought led to the agents' car, the two men stopped, one on either side of him.

  "We can talk here."

  "Here?" Pellam stepped back to put some distance between him and the agents. He brushed against the brick wall of one of the houses. He turned and found himself hemmed in.

  Pellam turned back to Bracken. "Couldn't we-"

  "Shut up," barked the unscruffy Monroe.

  Bracken pointed a stubby finger at Pellam's chest and pushed him hard against the wall. "We know he got to you. We know he's pulling your dick." Though they both shaved, Bracken had done the sloppier job of it. He smelled of sweat. No after-shave for these boys.

  Grim-faced, Pellam waved his arm in the air and started toward the mouth of the alley. "You can go to hell."

  Two huge fists suddenly grabbed his shoulders and slammed him back into the wall. His head bounced against the window, which cracked under the impact.

  "We're not getting through to you," Monroe said.

  An unlicensed pistol in his waistband, Pellam did not want to be frisked. He lifted his arms unthreateningly, palms outward. "Why don't you just tell me what this is all about."

  "A witness to a federal crime who refuses to testify or who fabricates testimony known to be false can be guilty of contempt, obstruction of justice and perjury." Bracken wore a thick gold bracelet on his hairy wrist, which seemed unbecoming on an agent of the federal government.

  "As well as conspiracy if a link can be shown between him and the primary perpetrator."

  Bracken lowered his face into Pellam's, "I'm talking about if you haven't got the balls to tell us what you saw that night we're looking at you as an accessory."

  "Are you arresting me?"

  "No, sir."

  "Then this is harassment. I think it's time I called my lawyer."

  Braken took him by the lapels again and shoved him back against the wall. Pellam remembered to keep his head tilted forward so he wouldn't break any more windows. "We know you saw Crimmins in the Lincoln and we want you to identify him."

  "I don't even know who you're talking about."

  "The man who's paying you off? You don't remember him?"

  A surveillance photograph appeared from Monroe's pocket. It had been lifted from a videotape and the time and date were visible in the right-hand comer. The picture showed a heavyset man with a broad, Slavic face and receding hairline. His mouth was open and he was turning his head to speak to an unseen person walking behind him.

  "I've never seen him."

  "Look again, Pellam. That's Peter Crimmins."

  "I do not-"

  "Look again, Pellam," Monroe said. "He's the man who was in the Lincoln. He's the man responsible for the death of

  Vincent Gaudia and for the shooting of a Maddox policeman. He's the man you saw. All we need is your confirmation."

  "I can't confirm what I didn't see."

  "You're not going to cooperate?" Bracken barked.

  "This is cooperation – listening to you two. In fact, it's beyond cooperation. I'm leaving."

  ***

  It had been a long, long hour.

  Peter Crimmins was sweating. His Sea Island cotton shirt was wet in the small of his back and under the arms. The sweat would bead on his chest hair, and when he moved, would press, cold, against the skin. Sweat was gathering too in the deep folds of fat where his waist met his chest. It trickled down his back.

  Crimmins knew that at any time he could have asked the agents to leave and then they would either have to let him go or arrest him. But if they arrested him- which they might easily have done-that meant he would have to have his friend and counselor present.

  That was something Crimmins didn't want. So he had consented to the questioning. He waved the men into seats in his office, sandwiched between the parking lot and the room of dark desks, and rested his fingertip on the mole above his eye.

  The barrage of questions lasted for an hour. They were handsome black men and looked more like recent business school graduates than federal agents. They seemed Wee many of Crimmins's clients (both the legitimate ones and the less so) – clever, polite, reserved.

  But underneath: the personalities of a Midwest dawn in January.

  One asked the questions. The other alternated between staring calmly at Crimmins and taking notes.

  "Could I ask you where you were last Friday night, sir?"

  He hated the sir. The way it fell like a fleck of spit off the end of the sentence showed their contempt for him. But what could he do? That was an old rule in negotiations-never say anything that can be quoted against you later. If he later claimed harassment, the agent would say, I never called him anything but "sir"… Look at the transcript.

  "I was at my office most of the night."

  "Until when?"

  "About ten. Quarter to, maybe."

  "By yourself?"

  "Yes. My secretary leaves at five-fifteen every night. I stay late a lot of times."

  "Is there a guard?"

  "We got guards, sure. But I didn't see any of them that night when I left."

  "Is there any way of confirming your whereabouts?"

  "You really think I killed Vince Gaudia?" Crimmins asked, exasperated.

  "Is there any way of confirming it, sir?" the agent repeated.

  "No."


  "Do you own a Lincoln?"

  "Yes. And a Mercedes wagon. A diesel."

  "What color is the Lincoln?"

  Crimmins rubbed the bump of his third eye. Why did they hate him so? "Dark blue. But you know that already, don't you?"

  "What's the license number?"

  He gave it to them

  "Where was that car on the night we've been talking about?"

  Crimmins was hungry. He had bouts of low blood sugar. If he didn't eat regularly-sometimes five meals a day-he would have attacks. He thought with some pleasure that Vince Gaudia never got to eat his last meal the night he died. "I drove it into the city."

  "And parked it where, sir?"

  "The place I always park it. The garage near the Ritz."

  "And that's a Lincoln Continental?"

  "I told you that already."

  "Actually, no. We don't know what model. Is it a Continental?"

  "It's a Town Car."

  "Now tell me again where you were on that night."

  Crimmins asked, "Where I was sitting, you mean?"

  "You were in your office, you claim."

  "I'm not claiming. I was there. I told you that. Didn't he write it down? I saw him write it down."

  "Why wasn't your secretary there?"

  "She leaves about five-fifteen every day. I told you that too."

  The interview went on and on and on and the agents picked over every word that Crimmins said.

  Finally the men stood. They flipped their notebooks closed and gathered their raincoats. Suddenly they were gone.

  He now sat at his desk, staring at the familiar nicks along the side, running his finger over them, feeling the bulge of his gut against his belt. '