“Can’t you call the manufacturer and get the parts overnighted in?”
“Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving,” the foreman said. “I’ll call today, but Fed Ex won’t deliver till Friday.”
“This is Tuesday,” Wolf said, relieved that the man had got his days wrong. “Thanksgiving isn’t until day after tomorrow. You can have the parts here tomorrow, and I can be on my way.”
The foreman turned to the mechanic waiting beside the airplane. “What’s today, Charley?”
“Wednesday,” the man replied.
“Thanksgiving’s tomorrow,” the foreman said to Wolf.
“No, no…” Wolf looked at the day and date displayed on his wristwatch. “It’s…” He stopped and stared at his wristwatch. “That can’t be,” he said, shaking his head.
“Sure can, Mr. Willett. It’s Wednesday, and tomorrow’s
Thanksgiving. I can have the parts here by ten-thirty Friday morning, and we’ll have ’em installed by early afternoon.”
Wolf rubbed his forehead. Something was terribly wrong here. “Okay, where can I get a room?”
“Try the lodge. Rent yourself a car at the terminal over there, and follow the signs. It’s real nice, and they won’t be full this time of year.”
The lodge, a huge place, had a room for him. He explained why he didn’t have any luggage, and a bellhop took him upstairs. He immediately called the Bel Air house and got a recording of his own voice. He hung up. Julia could never remember to play the messages on the machine anyway, so leaving a message would be a waste of time. He didn’t have his address book with him, and the Carmichaels’ number was unlisted. He telephoned his office, but got a recording saying that it was closed until Monday for the Thanksgiving holiday. He didn’t remember giving everybody Wednesday, but when he hadn’t shown up for work yesterday, Jack had probably given them the day off; Jack was too softhearted.
He hung up the phone and walked to the window. He had a fine view of the canyon, and it was truly grand, but he hardly noticed. Try as he might, he could not remember the past twenty-four hours. He remembered going to bed, but that must have been on Monday. He picked up the Tucson newspaper that came with the room and checked the date to be sure. Wednesday.
He had lost a day out of his life. And it wasn’t the first time.
Wolf woke up the next morning feeling horny and reached for Julia. She was not there, of course; she was in L.A. At least he thought she was. He had rung the Bel Air house a dozen times and gotten only his own recording. He had rung Jack’s house, too, and gotten no answer.
He and Julia had been married a year. It was a second marriage for him—he had been widowed for more than twenty years—but the first for her. She was twenty-six at the time, and an actress. Two kinds of women he’d promised himself he’d never marry—a woman in the business and somebody half his age. It had gone well, though, had exceeded his expectations. Julia was wonderful company, and she had revived his nearly dormant sex life. She made him feel eighteen again, and he would always love her for that. God knew, she was too friendly with other men, and she was making a career out of shopping, which drove him nuts, but she was beautiful and shrewd, two qualities that had always appealed to him. She would probably leave him on his sixty-fifth birthday, but if she lasted that long, it would be worth it.
He reached for his wristwatch: nearly noon. He never slept that late—what was the matter with him? He stood in the shower long enough to wake him, but when he got out, he still felt fuzzy around the edges. He shaved with the razor the hotel had lent him and got dressed, squirming in the damp underwear and socks that he had rinsed out the night before. There was still no answer at the Bel Air house.
Downstairs, he asked for a
New York Times
.
“Sorry, sir,” the young thing at the desk said, “we don’t get any papers at all on holidays. Will you be having Thanksgiving dinner with us?”
It was that or McDonald’s in the village, he thought. “Yes, of course.”
He ate hungrily, having slept through breakfast; he drank nearly a bottle of wine with lunch, feeling sorry for himself for being alone on Thanksgiving, then had a long after-lunch nap in his room. Later, he forced himself to go for a walk along the rim of the canyon, but he had seen it many times before, and it wasn’t working its charm today; he was too depressed. Here he was on his favorite holiday, far from wife and friends, stuck with no way out until the new parts arrived tomorrow.
He went back to the hotel, bought a paperback novel in the shop, and tried to read it. He was asleep again by nine.
He was wakened in broad daylight by the sound of something sliding under his door. He raised a sleepy head: a
New York Times!
At least he could start the day with the news. He glanced at his watch: noon. He ordered breakfast from room service, then retrieved the newspaper, scanning the front page. He was about to open the paper and look inside when a small article in the lower right-hand corner of the front page caught his eye:
FILM DIRECTOR AND TWO OTHERS IN TRIPLE DEATH
Oh, God
, he thought,
it’s going to be somebody I know
. He read on quickly. It was somebody he knew.
The film director Jack Tinney of Los Angeles has been found dead in circumstances that police sources are describing as murder.
Wolf dropped the newspaper and put his head in his hands. He took deep breaths, trying to get hold of himself. He tried not to believe it, and he tried not to think of the
consequences. He picked up the paper again, read the same sentence twice, then looked at the masthead. It was truly the
New York Times;
it was not a joke newspaper; this was not some horrible gag somebody was pulling on him; this was really happening. He swallowed hard, tried to quiet the pounding in his chest, and read on. What came next nearly stopped his heart.
Tinney, 48, was found in a guest bedroom of a house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, belonging to his longtime business partner and producer, Wolf Willett. He appeared to have been killed by a shotgun blast.
He immediately thought of Flaps and how she had wanted to get into the guest wing. But Jack hadn’t even been in Santa Fe, he thought desperately. He read on.
Also found in the room were the bodies of Willett, 53, and his wife Julia Camden Willett, 27, an actress. They appeared to have been killed in the same manner.
This got him breathing hard. He read the words again. They still didn’t make any sense. He continued.
The bodies were discovered by a housekeeper, Maria Estavez, who had been alerted to their presence by a dog in the house. The apparent murder weapon, an expensive twelve-gauge shotgun made by Purdey, the famous gunmakers of London, England, was found in the room. The Santa Fe Police Depart- ment has issued a statement saying that the murders were committed sometime Tuesday evening and that so far they have no suspects. Obituaries on page B14.
Wolf fell back onto the bed, his head reeling. He closed his eyes and clutched the covers, trying to lie as still as possible, fighting nausea. Gradually he restored his breathing to something like normal. Then he tried to think.
He could come up only with this: His wife and business partner and some other unfortunate human being were dead; they had been killed in his house with his shotgun, one of a matched pair; they had been killed at a time when he was obviously present in the house. And he could remember nothing of that day or night.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough to scare the shit out of him.
W
olf resisted the impulse to immediately bolt from the hotel, primarily because he had no place to go. He drove to the airport and paid his repair bill, then returned to the hotel and spent the afternoon fighting an overwhelming feeling of guilt—for what, he was not quite sure. By the time it got dark and dinner had arrived from room service, the guilt had become localized. He must have been responsible for what had happened. He tried to dredge up his reasons.
He had been drunk, of course—else, why would he not remember? Or were his deeds on that lost day so terrible that his mind simply could not cope with them? Sex was at the root of this, of that he was sure. Since meeting Julia he had lived with the fear that he could not satisfy her, that she would turn to another man to supplement or—God help him—replace his attentions. She had always been insatiable, but she had always had the talent of keeping
him aroused. He had been keeping up with her, but just barely, and he had lived in fear of what might happen if she nudged him some night in bed and he wasn’t up to it.
More disturbing of late was that Julia had begun to evince an interest in more than one sex partner. This had frightened him when she had first broached the subject, then excited him when he had realized that her interest was in having another woman in bed, a longtime fantasy of his. Twice, both times in Santa Fe, Julia had successfully propositioned another woman. They had been nights to remember. Even now, recalling it, he found himself stimulated. Both women had satisfied him beyond his fantasies, then had turned to each other, and he had been held rapt by that sight. Then he had suspected that all this was a prelude to inviting another man into their bed.
This thought seemed to point to what might have happened: He got drunk, Julia took Jack and another man to bed; he had caught them and, in a drunken fit of jealousy, used the shotgun on them. As he thought about this scenario, he realized that he had to find out exactly what had happened. First, he had to see the room where the three had died; then he had to find a way to penetrate the shield of his own memory. He had an idea of how to do that.
He waited until after dinner before leaving the hotel. Santa Fe Airport closed at ten
P.M.
, and after that it became a ghost of a landing field. He knew, because once he had landed at a quarter past ten, his car battery had been dead, and he had nearly frozen before he had found a telephone and gotten some assistance.
It was just after nine when he took off from Grand Canyon and headed east; this would put him at Santa Fe around ten forty-five. He had filed no flight plan, and he climbed to eleven thousand five hundred feet before level
ing off; this altitude would give him some westerly tail wind without requiring oxygen. He sat immobile in the airplane for nearly an hour, numb with grief, guilt, and fear. Then his eye caught something in the
New York Times
on the seat beside him: “Obituaries on page B14.” His curiosity got the better of him.
There were only three obituaries on the page: his, Julia’s, and Jack’s. Jack’s occupied the whole of the page above the fold. There was a detailed analysis of his career, his childhood in Tennessee, his four marriages, his many women, and anything else that could be found out about him by a shrewd newspaperman. It was obvious that the piece had been written well in advance.
Such care was not present in Wolf’s obit. There was a brief, fairly accurate summary of his life before the William Morris Agency, then this statement:
Wolf Willett’s subsequent career was so wrapped up in Jack Tinney’s as to be nearly invisible. Certainly, he devoted himself to relieving Tinney of the minutiae surrounding any filmmaker, allowing the director the time to polish his scripts and perfect his editing. Indeed, that may have been Wolf Willett’s chief, and perhaps only, contribution to American film.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” he yelled into the roar of the airplane’s engine. Was that what the world thought he did? Relieve Jack Tinney of “the minutiae surrounding any filmmaker”? Did not the
New York Times
, in its artistic wisdom, know that he had browbeaten and cajoled Jack, who hated to write, into writing—then had edited, cut, compressed, and rewritten his scripts until they squeaked of economy and wit; that Jack had hardly ever entered an
editing room? That he knew next to nothing about music and scoring and recording? That Wolf had paid his bills, negotiated his divorce settlements, forced him to file tax returns, cosigned his borrowings, invested his meager (and enforced) savings, paid off the paternity plaintiffs, and sobered him up a couple of times a year after Jack’s monumental binges? And after that, because it worked better in the trades and newspapers and the Academy, allowed Jack to take home the credit and the Oscars? Jesus fucking Christ!
But if Jack’s obituary had infuriated him, Julia’s shook him to his core. It was not as brief as his own.
The woman who called herself Julia Camden before she married Wolf Willett was born Miriam Schlemmer, daughter of a German-Jewish pawnbroker, Solomon Schlemmer, in Cleveland, Ohio, some seven years before her claimed birth date. During her high school years, she was arrested on numerous occasions, usually for shoplifting or joyriding in stolen cars with boy- friends. After moving to New York in the late 1970s, she served two brief terms in the Women’s Detention Center on Riker’s Island for prostitution, extortion, and trafficking in cocaine. In 1985, she turned up in Los Angeles with her new name and an apparently faked resume as an actress in off-Broadway productions and soon found work in the film business, at least once in a pornographic movie. It was when she appeared in Jack Tinney’s film
Broken Charms—
ironically, playing a streetwalker—that she met the man who would become her third husband. Previously, she had been married to a New York taxi driver who dabbled in procurement of women and drugs and to a man described by police as a minor Harlem drug kingpin.
In her new existence as Mrs. Wolf Willett, she became active in film charities, and in Santa Fe became a follower of psychiatrist and “wholistic psychotherapist” Mark Shea, who had previously been arrested in New York for practicing medicine without a license.
Mrs. Willett is survived by a younger sister who is serving a five- to eight-year sentence for the involuntary manslaughter of her husband, a diamond dealer in the New York jewelry district whom she had attempted, with an accomplice, to rob.