Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Clete Williams, looking craggy and weathered and handsome, said, “You know what I want now? I want a really nice peppermint ice cream cone with sprinkles on top. That’s what I want.”
He was sipping a glass of bourbon and pacing back and forth in his room.
I sat on the bed and watched him. There were several reporters outside, but Clete was barricaded in, not talking to anyone.
The reporters made a lot of noise, and every so often one of them would accidentally kick the door to remind us that they were waiting out there.
Clete bunched a fist. “Sons of bitches,” he said. “They better get off my back.” He stared at the door, and then looked back at me, and then he seemed to force himself to relax. He finished the bourbon. “You ever had one of those when you were a kid?”
“What?”
“Peppermint with sprinkles.”
“Sure,” I said.
“They’re the greatest.”
Clete Williams is, according to the bio I wrote, thirty-six years old (really forty-two) and born in Newport, Rhode Island (actually Saugus, Massachusetts), of a well-to-do family.
Most of the moviegoing public knows how Clete rejected the standards of his upbringing, became a sort of bum, worked his way across country, and eventually became a tough brawling leading man in the tradition of Mitchum and Wayne.
It’s all crap. Actually, his father was a plumber who took off, stranding his mother, who was a waitress in a fried-clam place on the beach, and Clete got a job as an extra working on a film shooting in Boston.
One of the leading women became fond of him and started referring to him as the Stallion, and he turned into a local celebrity and eventually got film offers.
As a star, Clete is tough publicitywise.
Most of your big stars today are straightforward.
Like Redford and Newman, everybody knows they’re married, and where they live, and so on and so on.
Their style is much more human. But Clete is from the old school.
He’s really a personality, not an actor.
Let’s face it, Clete can’t act. But he has what we call screen presence.
And on camera, his forty-eight-inch chest looks enormous. Women go nuts over him.
Clete is a physical guy. He does all his own stunts, does his own riding.
He likes all that, but of course it makes insurance trouble.
He’s almost impossible to insure because he drinks too much and gets into fights all the time.
And also, he’s always getting injured on the set, because the truth is that he’s accident-prone.
How the hell could somebody who’s made ten billion Westerns let a goddamned horse step on his foot and break his toe?
In other pictures, Clete Williams had twisted his knee; shot himself in the leg with a blank, producing a hematoma; dislocated his shoulder in a fight scene; gotten whiplash on a pickup truck spill; and cracked a rib doing a fall.
Early in the picture, I had the delicate job of writing a press release about all these past injuries and his new broken toe.
It’s delicate because you’d love to use that angle—the dangers of moviemaking—but you aren’t supposed to get any mileage out of injury.
Otherwise, the insurance companies are all over you.
They suspect rigging, or they suspect a phony ploy to hide some other production delay.
So I had to write a very circumspect, mournful press release commenting on how poor Mr. Williams had broken his toe. But I couldn’t tell how he’d broken his toe—that was too humiliating. So I said it was “in the course of production,” or something vague like that.
Clete later told reporters that he was dodging away from a hissing rattler that had appeared unexpectedly in a sequence where he had to climb a cliff. Clete can be very inventive on his own behalf.
But right now, at eight o’clock in the morning, Clete Williams was pouring himself another bourbon and saying, “I wonder if we could get somebody to go for an ice cream cone.”
“I wouldn’t advise it,” I said.
“Yeah, you’re probably right.” He capped the bottle and sat down on the bed opposite me. “Mann send you here to hold my hand?”
“He asked me to check on you.”
“You seen McDougall?”
I nodded.
“I saw him too,” Clete said, frowning in a handsome way.
“Stupid bastard. Of all times to get pissed and fall down and crack his skull, he picks now. Jesus.” He paused reflectively.
“Hell of a thing,” he said. “You know, when I saw him, I couldn’t help thinking it was a damned good makeup job.
Isn’t that terrible?” He snorted. “I suppose we all have to be sanctimonious the next few days. We’ll all have to say kind words about the bastard. ”
“You’re right,” I said. “He was a bastard.”
“Yeah. Now why can’t we say that? He was a pompous little shit,” Williams continued.
“That’s the truth. I’d love to see—just once, just once in my life—I’d love to see a funeral service where somebody got up to the pulpit and said, ‘The dearly beloved deceased was a stinker, everybody hated him, and all of us gathered here can be pleased and relieved that the son of a bitch is finally dead, which he richly deserved and spent most of his life asking for.’”
I watched him sip the drink. He was edgy, and the liquor was hitting him. It occurred to me that he might have to talk with reporters later. “Maybe you better take it easy,” I said.
He stared at me for a moment. “Would you be happier if I switched to vodka?”
“You have to be practical,” I said. “Vodka might be better.”
“Okay, vodka.” He poured the bourbon down the bathroom sink.
I watched him stand in the bathroom for a moment and stare at the tub.
As I said, all the rooms in the Holiday Inn were identical—Clete’s bathroom was just like McDougall’s.
“Hell of a thing,” he said, shaking his head.
He came back with a fresh glass, dropped in some ice cubes, and poured vodka. “Join me?”
“No thanks.”
“You know, there is a chance,” he said, sitting down again, “that this could get very messy. Do you know what I mean?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, what I mean exactly is that McDougall and I had a fight last night, and I hit him in the mouth.”
I groaned inwardly. “Where?” I asked.
“Right smack in the kisser.”
“No, I mean where did you have the fight?”
“Downstairs. In the El Padrone bar of the Tucson Holiday Inn. You must know the place.”
He said this last bit facetiously. We had been here for three weeks now. We all knew every inch of the Holiday Inn, especially the El Padrone bar.
“What time?”
“Ten thirty, maybe eleven. Pretty late.”
That was late, I thought, for an actor who had a six-thirty call. Clete would have to get up at five thirty, so he should have gone to bed at ten or so.
“What was it all about?”
“The fight? Brenda.”
I rubbed my face wearily. The male lead fights with the writer over the female lead, and then the writer is found dead the next morning. This was just wonderful.
“A lot of people see it?”
“The usual,” Clete said, meaning the usual number of company people in the bar at that hour. At least twenty witnesses.
I sighed.
“Look,” Clete said, “I’m trying to help you by telling you all this early. I had a fight with him last night. I didn’t hurt him much—I certainly didn’t kill him, as everybody saw—but I did have a fight.”
“What was the argument over?”
“He said she had a thing for younger men.”
I shook my head, puzzled. It was common knowledge that Brenda Conrad had a constant parade lining up at her door—not to mention the fact that if it were a male star sleeping with younger women, no one would bat an eyelash.
“I know, I know,” Clete said, holding up his hand. “Fish in a barrel. But he was being obnoxious, and I got mad, and I let him have it.”
“Were you drinking?”
“Everybody was drinking.”
“Was he hurt?”
“No, hell no. He didn’t even bleed.”
“Did he hit you back?”
“No. He just got off the barstool, and then he left, swearing under his breath. It was really nothing, Harvey. But it’ll get talk.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “It sure will.”
Outside in the hall, the reporters were kicking down the doors again.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t want you to talk to those guys. Just stay here and make no comments. I’m sure the studio will be sending out lawyers on the next plane. Wait until they talk to you.”
He nodded, taking a long pull from his glass.
“Oh, one other thing,” I said, getting up to leave. “Greenblatt has sent for Perkins.”
“What?”
“That’s right.”
“Perkins is murder.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Does Mann know about this?”
“I told him.”
“And what’d he say?”
“Mann never heard of Perkins before.”
“Jesus, nothing like an intelligent, knowledgeable producer.” Clete shook his head. “Everybody in Hollywood is afraid of Perkins. I mean everybody.”
“I know, but that’s what Greenblatt’s done.”
“He must be out of his fucking mind,” Clete said, and drank some more vodka.
* * *
Brenda Conrad was two doors down from Clete and one door down from McDougall.
There were reporters outside her door, too, but unlike Williams, she wasn’t alone inside.
She had her ten-year-old daughter, Lisa, and Lisa’s governess, a woman named Mrs. Maloney, who was English and wore black all the time.
There was also some young suntanned kid wearing Levi’s and a University of Arizona Athletic Department sweatshirt.
He was obviously Brenda’s latest “friend.”
Brenda was sitting in bed, wearing a shorty nightgown and crying. And everybody else was more or less standing around and watching her cry.
My bio of Brenda Conrad—age unspecified, but for you it’s thirty-four—simply mentioned her starring performances in White Heat, The Beautiful Dream, and her Oscar nomination for the role of Katie in Sands of Time.
I had strict orders from Greenblatt to play Brenda classy, which meant to concentrate on her reputation as an actress.