Bloody River Blues: A Location Scout Mystery Page 8

  “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 pu
shers, 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—”

  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 kids 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 kind 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.”