“Liar.”
“No, Meg, really—”
She stepped toward him. “Tell me how my poor baby got in too deep! You and Dale had cash from day one. You bought out your contract . . . Oh, you had somebody bankrolling you and knew exactly who you were going to sell this shit to from the day you opened your factory.”
“Stop it!”
“Tell me how someone put a gun to your head and forced you to—” She stopped speaking, frowned. “Wait.” More horror in her eyes. “And what happened to him, to Dale?”
“He . . .” Keith looked away.
“They killed him. Those twins . . . Why? Was he getting too greedy?”
“It all got out of hand,” Keith said furiously.
She was continuing, “And those other men, the ones from New York . . . And the boy who overdosed last year . . . And Ned! This morning. They killed him too! And Tom thought Sam had done it! Oh, Jesus Christ.”
“And Marty,” Pellam said.
It took Keith a moment to realize who Marty was.
He said, “That was an accident. I swear to God. Bobby and Billy were trying to scare the two of you out of here. That’s all. We didn’t want strangers in town. We couldn’t risk any publicity.”
Pellam said, “Accident? You killed your partner and who knows who else—and you expect me to believe that you just wanted to scare Marty?”
Meg, incredulous. Shaking her head slowly, her ponytail lolling. “And you almost killed our son?”
“I told them—” Nodding in the direction of the front yard. “—never to sell to anybody around here. But they didn’t listen to me. It wasn’t my fault. I—”
“Not your fault? You made it and now you’re selling it. How do you mean it’s not your fault? Explain that to me, Keith.”
Keith couldn’t hold her eyes any longer and looked down.
She simply shook her head. Her rage was too great.
Pellam could see that he’d fallen into a particular persona—one that must have suckered Meg all along: Keith the boy with the thick hair, the round face. Imploring, needing love. The pudgy boy.
“We have nothing to talk about. Nothing at all.”
“Please, let me explain.”
She turned to look at him as he slouched in the doorway, pressing against the jamb with his shoulder as if he needed the house itself to hold him upright.
Meg said, “You’ve lied to me all along.”
“I didn’t want to tell you. For your own protection.”
Meg said bitterly, “How did you figure that?”
“If anything were to happen I didn’t want you to be involved.”
She laughed in astonishment. “How
wouldn’t
I be involved? My husband’s making drugs! How
wouldn’t
Sam and I be sucked right into the middle of it? I mean, look what happened the other day with Sam. He could’ve died.”
“That won’t happen again.”
She was crying now. “Oh, God, Keith. . . . You sound like you’re not going to stop. Tom’s dead! There’re two bodies in my front yard. It’s over with. We’re calling the police.”
“No, Meg. What I’ve come up with, it’s magic.” His eyes gleamed. “Nobody’s ever made anything like this before. Nobody else can.”
She spat out, “You sound proud of it.”
He shouted, “I am proud! You really don’t know who I am. You’ve never made the least effort to see me. I’m not the same as everybody else. My mind doesn’t walk, it runs. I was born that way. I’m not like you. Or him.” He glanced at Pellam. “Or anybody.”
“But we loved each other,” Meg cried.
“What does that have to do with anything? Don’t sound so self-righteous. I did it for you. And for Sam. Why do you think? You were always harping about a nice house, having money, your fucking jewelry! How was I supposed to do that on a chemist’s salary?” He pointed to her ring. “You think I could afford that if I was still at Sandberg?”
“Are you seriously trying to blame me? You should blame whatever’s in you that makes you think you’ve got a different set of rules than everybody else. And, what? We’re just supposed to forget everything that’s happened? Well, I’m not forgetting. Sam and I are leaving.”
“You’re going with
him
?” Keith glanced at Pellam. His voice was filled with disbelief.
“I’m just leaving. That’s the only explanation I owe you. Sam and I, we’re both leaving.”
“You can’t just desert me.”
“Desert you?” Meg laughed.
The tension in the room was like energy itself.
“I’m not going to let that happen!” Keith’s voice jarred in the room, a sound to match the glare of light. “You’re my wife. You’re staying with me. In six months, I’ll have the patent and I’ll stop selling on the street. We’ll get a license from Pfizer or Merck. We’ll tell the state police the twins tried to break in and rape you. Tom was here about Sam and they killed him. We can say—”
“No more.” Her eyes closed and her head moved back and forth slowly. “No more.” She stood up. “We’re not staying here tonight.”
“Meg, no.” He wasn’t a boy any longer. He was mean, dark, brooding.
Their words swirled around Pellam. As they talked, husband and wife, he heard what they said and he observed their expressions but it was from a distance.
Here you come, with your van and your camera, studying the town, talking to people, getting to know everyone . . . Getting to know
some
of them very well. You don’t understand the power you’ve got.
But no, he thought, I have no power. Nothing he could say or do could teach them about happiness and lift them out of the ruts they’d fallen into. He made movies. He helped people escape from their lives, sure, but only for two hours and only in that
one special place: a darkened movie theater or living room. “I’m leaving now.”
Keith focused on Pellam, said to him, “You mention this to anyone, I guess you can figure out what’ll happen to them.” He nodded toward Meg.
“What are you saying, Keith?” she asked.
Pellam said, “He’s saying that if I go to the police, even if he beats the murder charges, there’ll be a RICO case against him. The U.S. Attorney’ll close up the factory and take the house and your savings.”
Keith nodded. “That’ll be on your conscience.”
Pellam laughed, said nothing. He looked at Meg. “You want a ride someplace? Family or friends nearby?”
Keith said, “She’s not coming with you.”
“That’s not your decision.”
Meg said to Pellam, “Let me get Sam.”
Keith said, “Meg, you’re my wife! You—”
“Stop it!” she screamed. Keith the boy, Keith the man stopped speaking. “You don’t own me. I’m leaving!”
Pellam sensed it then. In an intuitive flash, he knew.
A combination of things told him—the peripheral sight of Keith reaching for his waistband, his gasping breath, the click of spring metal.
The sound of a gun cocking—Bobby’s, of course, which Pellam had forgotten about, left lying under the twin’s body on the front porch. Keith had retrieved it on his way inside the house.
The click that was almost hidden by a rising shout, a single word.
One word—his own name—filling the night, as
Keith shoved the gun toward him and wailed in primitive rage, “Pellam!”
“No, Keith!” Meg cried.
Pellam’s left hand shot forward in a futile, automatic gesture to ward off the scalding bullet.
A ringing explosion. The muzzle blast struck him in the face and hand.
Meg screamed, “John!”
They froze, like children playing the game of statue. Three of them.
There was an endless moment of silence, the sweet piquancy of smoke filling the room.
The gun fell from Keith’s hand to the floor and with a wail of anguish he dropped to his knees.
Pellam, waiting for the pain, the blackness, the crawl of blood, stood completely still.
Nothing. He was unhurt.
The man had missed. From fifteen feet away Keith had missed.
He whispered to Meg, “It’s all right, I’m okay.”
She was shaking her head. “What’m I going to do about this?”
“What?” Pellam asked.
Meg didn’t answer. Her head was lowered in concentration, frowning as she studied the diamonds on her finger. “Look at this ring. Look at it. What a mess.”
Meg held up her hand, covered with the blood that spread from the front of her blouse. “Can you help me? I’ll never get it clean.” Her smile faded. Her eyes fluttered closed. “Can you help me,” she whispered as she spiraled slowly to the floor. “Can you?”
TRUDIE, TANNED AND
dark-haired and model-thin (the best calves of any woman he’d ever known but, alas, no freckles anywhere on her body), drove east on Santa Monica, moving slowly in the morning traffic toward the expressway.
John Pellam sat on the passenger side of her white Mercedes 450 SL.
He sat silently, with his suitcase (purchased on Main Street, Cleary, not Rodeo Drive) on his lap. Trudie was animated. She was preoccupied with a teleplay Lorimar was kicking around. She had a fifty-two percent interest in the property. He thought that’s what she’d told him. The radio was loud and she nodded in time to the beat, smiling broadly, though Pellam knew that what she hummed was the tune of business, not a Top 40 hit.
Pellam thought she was a wonderful woman. He’d enjoyed going out with her. He’d enjoyed staying with her, lying in a huge bed, sipping sweet liquor drinks on a cement patio high above a junglish canyon (Trudie had a fall-
er
house).
They passed the park in Beverly Hills where one morning—must have been five a.m.—he’d found
Tommy Bernstein, in a tuxedo, passed out. Pellam himself had been wasted. Tommy had said to him, “Fuck, it’s the U.S. Cavalry. Get me home. Am I in bed? I don’t think so, no, I don’t. Get me home!”
After much time and effort Pellam had.
At Tommy’s funeral the minister had been a hired gun, which wasn’t too surprising, since Tommy hadn’t been inside a church in thirty years. The somber man said a lot of innocuous things. Generic-brand sentiments. Not to put that down, of course. Pellam thought the doughy old guy with the stiff white collar had done a good job, under the circumstances. “The lively spirit that Thomas had, the spirit that touched us all with the love for the characters he played . . .” Well, Tommy’d have said, “Barf on that,” and howled. But that was hardly the minister’s fault. The funeral had been near the intersection they were passing through just then. Avenue of the Stars.
“I talked to that exec producer.”
Trudie liked that, shortening words and slinging them around.
Exec, photog, res,
as in
Make a res at a restaurant.
“Yeah?” he asked brightly.
“He was like beside himself.”
“Yeah?” Pellam couldn’t remember exactly which exec she was talking about, or why he was, or should be, beside himself. They drove in silence, through that brilliant light, California light, that seems to bring out some essential radiation from the grass and trees. It gets right in your face, like a beautiful, obnoxious teenage girl. From behind his sunglasses Pellam watched the scenery. And the cars—a thousand German cars, it seemed—moving opposite, toward Hollywood.
“Won’t be back for a while, huh?”
“Probably not.”
Trudie didn’t answer, just squeezed his knee. She turned the radio up. They were in Beverly Hills; sentiment didn’t exist.
“So,” she said. “You sure you want to do this?”
“Yep,” he said and didn’t add anything else.
Ten silent minutes later she dropped him at the airport. He didn’t want or expect her to get out. They kissed like siblings and the only clues to the deepest moments of their on-again, off-again year together was a shallow shaking of her head and the sad, mystified smile she lapsed into from time to time.
“Call me sometime,” she said.
Pellam promised that he would.
He handed his suitcase to the curbside check-in attendant, and when he turned back, Trudie was gone.
JOHN PELLAM SAT
on a hundred-year-old gravestone, looking out over this upstate New York valley, filled with trees gone to vibrant yellow red. The sun had just disappeared under a row of clouds and the beautiful scenery had taken on an ominous nature.
Adding to which was the man moving slowly, solemnly forward. He was dressed in minister’s black garb. When he was twenty feet away from an open grave, the man paused and closed his eyes, as if finding strength from somewhere, then he opened a Bible.
He started forward once more.
Pellam rose from the cold stone and squinted at the furtive approach.
Suddenly motion on the ground nearby. The man
reared back in surprise and stumbled over a low tombstone. “Jesus Christ,” he called, dropping the Bible.
“What?” came a booming voice from a loudspeaker.
“It attacked me!” the man called, standing up and brushing grass from his slacks.
The electronic voice of God yelled, “Cut it, cut! What the hell happened?”
The field filled with people. The crew walked around from behind the Panaflex camera, Makeup went to work on the actor’s face. He called, “A squirrel . . . he attacked me!”
A stuntman grabbed his jacket and leapt into the graveyard, crying,
“Toro, toro!”
“Hilarious,” the director called sarcastically through the loudspeaker.
Pellam walked away from the gravestone and sat down in an old green-plaid lawn chair next to his Winnebago. He said, “You cold? You want to go inside?”
Meg Torrens squeezed his hand and said, “No, I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”
“I want a continuous shot,” the director sighed and walked back to the camera. Somebody from Wardrobe was rolling up the actor’s cuffs so they wouldn’t get dark from the moisture on the grass. The continuity girl began making notes of his position when the wild animal had attacked and the location of all the cameras and backgrounds.
“What’s the take?”
“That’ll be eight,” someone called.
“Jesus. And we’ll lose the light in ten minutes. What’s the weather supposed to be tomorrow?”
“Rain.”
“Jesus.”
Pellam and Meg watched the crew in the field. He said, “That’s the movies for you. Do it over and over then you wait for a while and do it again.”