Authors: Gregory Mcdonald
Hand in hand, they walked through the long shadows of the palm trees on Whitehead Street.
After a while she dropped her hand.
“I know what your question is,” she said in a low voice. “Your question is: do different rules for creative people give them the right to commit murder?”
“Don’t cry,” Fletch said. “It will make gulleys in your face powder.”
“I did not murder Steve Peterman,” Moxie said. “It’s important that you believe me, Fletch.”
Fletch said, “I know.”
“Wow!” Moxie said. “What’s all this about?”
“Sunset.”
There were hundreds of people on the dock. Spaced to keep out of each other’s sounds, there was a rock band, a country band, a string ensemble. There was a juggler juggling oranges and an acrobatic team bouncing each other into the air. There was a man dressed as Charlie Chaplin doing the funny walk through the crowd. There was an earnest young man preaching The Word of The Lord and a more earnest young man in a brown shirt and swastika armband preaching racial discrimination, and a most earnest young man satirizing them both, exhorting the people to believe in canned peas. Each had an audience of listeners, watchers, cheerers, and jeerers.
Across the water, the big red sun was dropping slowly to the Gulf of Mexico.
The people milling around on the dock, ambling from group to group, looking at each other, listening to each other, taking pictures of each other, were of every sort extant. One hundred miles of Florida Keys hang from continental U.S.A., like an udder, and to the southernmost point drip the cream and the milk and the scum of the whole continent. There are the artists, the writers, the musicians, young and old, the arrived, the arriving, and the never-to-arrive. There are numbers of single people of all ages, sometimes in groups, the searchers who sometimes find. There are the American families, with children and without, the professional and the working class, the retired and the honeymooners. There are the drug victims and the drug smugglers, the filthy, mind blown, and the gold-bedecked, corrupt, corrupting despoilers of the human being.
“Wow,” said Moxie. “What a fashion show.”
The people there were dressed in tatters and tailor-made, suits and strings, rags and royal gems.
“You should talk,” Fletch said, grinning into her huge plastic glasses.
“So many people for a sunset.”
“Happens every night. Even cloudy nights.”
“What an event. Someone should sell tickets. Really. Think what you have to do to get this many people into a theater.”
After touring the crowd, listening to the music, watching the performers, Fletch and Moxie found
an empty place on the edge of the dock and sat down. Their legs dangled over the water.
“What an outer reality,” Moxie said.
“Which reminds me,” Fletch said. “Simple enough question: who is the producer of
Midsummer Night’s Madness?”
“Steve Peterman.”
“I thought you said he was executive producer, or something.”
“He is. Sort of. There is another producer, Talcott Cross. I never met him. His job is finished, for now. He worked at setting things up. Casting. Most of the location work. You know, hiring people.”
“Where is he?”
“Los Angeles, I suppose. I think he lives in Hollywood Hills. Steve intended to be the line-producer on this film. That is, stay with it during shooting, and all that.”
“So which of them hired Geoff McKensie and which hired Sy Koller?”
“Cross hired McKensie. Peterman fired him.”
“And Peterman hired Koller.”
“Right.”
“So Peterman is more powerful than Cross? I mean, one of the co-producers is more equal than the other?”
“Sure. Cross is more of an employee. Hired to do the production stuff Steve didn’t want to do, or didn’t have time to do.”
“Does Cross get a share of the profits?”
“I suppose so. But probably not as big a share as Steve… would have gotten.”
Down the dock, also sitting on the edge, a girl in cut-off jeans was staring at Moxie.
“What makes Steve Peterman as a producer more powerful than his co-producer, what’s-his-name Cross?”
“Talcott Cross. Everything in this business, Fletch, comes down to one word: the bank. Where the money comes from.”
“Okay. That’s my question. I thought a producer was someone who raises money for a film.”
“A producer does an awful lot more than that.”
The girl in cut-off blue jeans nudged the boy sitting next to her. She said something to him.
“But it was Steve Peterman who raised the money for this film.”
“Yes. From Jumping Cow Productions, Inc.”
“What’s that?”
“An independent film company. A company set up to invest in films. The world’s full of ’em.”
“Forgive me for never having heard of it. Has it made many films?”
“I don’t think so. I think it has some others in pre-production. Most likely it has. I don’t know, Fletch. It could be a bunch of dentists who have pooled their money to invest in movies. Jumping Cow Productions could be a subsidiary of International Telephone and Telegraph, for all I know.”
Half the big red sun had sizzled into the Gulf. A black, ancient-rigged sloop was sailing up the harbor toward them.
“Don’t you care who’s producing your film?” Up the dock-edge Moxie was causing widening interest among the group of young people. “I
mean, if the source of the money is so all-fire important…”
Moxie sighed. “Steve Peterman was producing this film.”
The top of the sun bubbled on the horizon and was extinguished.
In the harbor, in front of the dock, the Sloop
Providence
fired her cannon and ran down the stars and stripes prettily.
And the people on the dock cheered.
Evening in Key West had been declared.
Fletch swung his feet onto the dock and stood up. “Let’s go home.”
“But, Fletch, after the sunset is better than before. That’s when the clouds pick up their colors.”
“There aren’t any clouds.”
She looked at the sky. “You’re right.”
The young people down the dock had stood up, too.
“Come on,” Fletch said. “We can walk slowly. Look back.” Moxie got to her feet. “You see the sun set in the ocean all the time anyway,” he said.
The girl in cut-offs was facing Moxie. “I know what you’re trying to do,” the girl said.
Her friends were all around her.
Moxie said nothing. She stepped closer to Fletch and took his arm.
“You’re trying to look like Moxie Mooney,” the girl laughed.
Moxie said, “Actually, I’m not.”
The young people around the girl laughed. One said, “Oh yeah.”
The girl said, “Moxie doesn’t wear all that crap on her face.”
“She doesn’t?” Moxie asked.
“She’s natural,” the girl said. “She don’t wear no make-up at all.”
“You’ve seen her?”
“Naw. But she’s stayin’ somewhere here in Key West.”
“She’s over on Stock Island,” said the boy. “In seclusion.”
“Yeah,” said another boy. “She murdered somebody.”
Moxie’s arm flexed against Fletch.
“You really think Moxie Mooney killed somebody?” she asked.
“Why not?” shrugged a boy.
“What are you—a look-alike contest?” asked another girl.
“I want to see her,” the girl in cut-offs said. “I’m gonna see her.”
“Well,” Fletch said. He tugged Moxie’s arm. “Good luck.”
The girl in cut-offs called after Moxie. “You look sorta like her.”
“Thanks,” Moxie called back. Miserably, she said, “I guess.”
They were walking back on Whitehead Street. There was some color in the sky.
“Anyway,” Fletch said in a cheery tone, “I enjoyed talking with your father this afternoon.”
“You like him, don’t you.”
“I admire him,” Fletch said. “Enormously.”
“I guess he’s a brilliant man,” Moxie admitted.
“He’s funny.”
“After all these decades of acting,” Moxie said, “he speaks as if every line were written for him. He says
Good Morning
and you have to believe it’s a good morning—as if nobody had ever said it before.”
“How come he’s all-of-a-sudden so attentive to you?”
“He’s not. He just landed on me. Can’t find work, I guess. Nobody else wants him.”
“Did he call you, did he write you, did he arrange to stay with you?”
“Course not. He had taken up residence in my apartment in New York. I didn’t even know it. When I went there a few weeks ago—you know, to talk to Steve Peterman—there he was at home in my apartment. His clothes and his bottles all over the place. He was nearly unconscious. Looking at cartoons on the television. I had to put him to bed.”
“Jesus,” Fletch said. “Frederick Mooney looking at cartoons on television. All the bad satires of himself.”
“I was pretty upset anyway. Yelling into the phone, trying to find Steve.”
“Had you given him a key to the apartment?”
“No. He had never been there before.”
“How did he get in?”
“The doorman gave him a key. He is Frederick Mooney, after all.”
“I heard someone else say that.”
“I mean, everyone knows he’s my father. I had never told the doormen to keep him out. What
else could they do—have a legendary genius raving in their lobby?”
“Different rules,” said Fletch. “This may seem strange to you, Moxie, put me down with those kids on the dock, but I’m proud and pleased to know your father. I find him damned interesting. I mean, for me to really see him and talk with him and know him. Even though he keeps confusing me with a corpse.”
“You’re not a corpse, Fletcher.” Moxie stroked his arm. “Not yet, anyway. Of course, if you get me to sign any more papers in the dark…”
“Think of all he’s done.”
“I had to bring him down here with me. What else could I do with him? Couldn’t leave him sitting there in New York.”
“So you packed him up and poured him onto the plane.”
“He entertained everybody in the first-class section. He had a few drinks, of course. There was a little girl, about twelve years old, sitting across the aisle from him. He started telling her the story of
Pygmalion.
He got everybody’s attention by making all Eliza Doolittle’s mouth noises. Began playing all the parts at once. Henry Higgins, the father. Then he began singing all the songs from
My Fair Lady.
People were standing in aisles.
Get me to the church, get me to the church, get me to the church on time…”
Moxie sawed out flat and guttural. “People crowded up from the coach section.”
“Marvelous,” Fletch said.
“It’s nuts!” she exclaimed.
“Yeah, nuts. But the little girl will never forget
it. No one aboard will. Frederick Mooney doing Shaw at thirty thousand feet.”
“Nuts!” she said. “Nuts! Nuts! Nuts!”
“I think it’s nice.”
“Against safety regulations,” Moxie said. “Have that many people in the aisles. Utterly nuts.”
“The obligations of talent,” Fletch said. “Different rules.”
“He’s a drunk,” Moxie said easily. “He’s a mad, raving drunk.”
“But you love him.”
“Hell,” she said. “I love him about as much as I love Los Angeles. He’s just very big on my landscape.”
Dinner at the Blue House was conch chowder, red snapper and Key lime pie. Mrs. Lopez provided the best Key West dining.
Before dinner, Lopez told Fletch Global Cable News had called several times and would like him to return the call. Fletch thanked him and did not return the call.
During dinner Frederick Mooney said to Moxie,
“But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter—or rather a disease that is in my flesh, which I must needs call mine.”
“Oh, no,” Moxie said. “More Lear.” Edith Howell said,
“Freddy’s a
learing
old man.”
“And you, Madame,” said Frederick Mooney, “are a bag of wind.”
And during dinner, Sy Koller said, “I knew something was going on between Dan Buckley and Steve Peterman. Buckley was not happy with Peterman…” He ran through his theory of the murder again, adding the idea this time that may-be Peterman had gotten Buckley into something illegal…
Moxie said nothing.
Stella Littleford, looking even smaller and more bedraggled than usual, said, “Marge Peterman.” As she spoke, she kept giving sad glances at her husband, who, after his swim, was still acting a little jumpy and at first kept his smiles perfunctory and his conversation to the mannerly minimum. “Wives can get to the point,” Stella said, “where divorce isn’t adequate. How long had the Petermans been married—ten years? And this was the first time I’ve ever seen Marge Peterman with her husband. I didn’t even know there was a Marge Peterman. And all this time Peterman’s been runnin’ all over the world, going to bed with people, doin’ what he wanted…”
“I don’t know,” Fletch said. “Did Peterman jump in and out of bed with people, Moxie?”
“Steve was interested in only one thing,” Moxie said, performing fine surgery on her fish. “Money. And talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. About money.”
“A wife gets tired of gettin’ shoved aside,” Stella Littleford insisted. “Of everybody tellin’ her she’s not important. Of bein’ told to do this, do that, do the other thing, and otherwise shut up and stay in the background. That could drive anybody to murder.”
“Stella killed Peterman,” giggled Gerry Littleford. “Out of respect for his wife.”
Stella colored. “Okay,” she said. “Why was Marge Peterman there? She’d never shown up before. There was no weekend planned, or anything. Our work schedule gave Peterman no more time off than it gave us. We had weeks to go before a break.”
“Is what you’re saying, Stella,” Fletch asked. “Is that Marge Peterman showed up on location with the intention of killing her husband?”
“Sure.”
“Does anybody know if she was expected?” Fletch looked around at the faces at his table.
“I don’t think she was,” Sy Koller said. “When you’re on location, directors—at least some of us—prefer not to have wives around…” He looked quickly at Geoffrey McKensie and then away. “Extraneous people.” He looked at Frederick Mooney who was blinking drunkenly over his plate. His eyes settled on Stella Littleford. “Apt to be damned distracting. It’s tough enough, you know, dealing with the emotions, the feelings, of the people working on a film. When those people have wives around, and husbands around to back them up, echo everything they say: lovers, retainers, and the odd relative …” Again Koller glanced at Mooney. “All telling them they’re right, they’re wrong, they’re this, they’re that, they
look tired this morning
—” Koller’s voice went to a bitchy falsetto, “—
and is that a pimple coming under your nose? And tell that Sy Koller that scene will never be right until he gives you a stronger exit line
… Makes it damned
tough for the director.” Sy Koller laughed at himself. “Didn’t mean to take advantage of a simple question and climb on my hobby horse. No,” he said to Fletch. “I don’t think Marge Peterman was expected. I think Peterman and I were of one mind on this topic. I bribed my own wife off with a trip to Belgium. I think if Steve knew his wife was coming he could have asked her not to.”