Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
I’d never been out to the shooting location at night.
Why would I? Why would anybody? It gets cold in the desert after the sun goes down, and you have no orientation in the dark, no way of judging where you are or how far away you are from anything.
I just followed the road up the mountain in my headlamps for half an hour until I finally saw the sign for Old Tucson and turned off.
Perkins, I should say, was very excited.
He had been getting more wired all night long and his professorial reserve was wearing thin.
By now he was hardly able to sit still in the passenger seat while I drove.
He was like a kid dressed up in a good suit.
I asked him what he meant about preventing a murder.
“I was being cryptic,” he said.
“I’ll say.”
We drove toward the town. I parked in a little side lot, and we got out and started looking for the night watchman. Did I mention it got cold at night? The daytime temperatures were over a hundred, but it was near freezing now.
“Seriously,” I said, shivering. “What are we doing out here?”
“I’ll probably need a ladder,” he said.
“What?”
“Just keep your eye out for a ladder.”
We found the watchman. I showed him my identification, and he let us onto the main street. I was still shivering, but Perkins’s energy was extraordinary. He was rubbing his hands with enthusiasm.
“Excellent, excellent,” he was saying. “Now where is the site?”
“The site?”
“For tomorrow’s stunt.”
I led him down the street, which was now dimly lit with naked wall lights, to a storefront. The sequence of action was that Clete would square off with Black Jed, and shoot him, and Jed would be blasted back by the impact into a plate glass window, into the store.
Perkins walked around the site. “No glass in the window now,” he said.
“No,” I said. “They’ll have candy glass in there tomorrow.”
“Now, the ram will be back here, inside the building. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“So the wire will pull him back. Uh-huh . . . Uh-huh.” He went into the storefront.
The nitrogen ram wasn’t there, of course. It was too valuable a piece of equipment to leave out at night. But its position was marked on the floor in chalk.
“They’ll do the stunt twice?” Perkins said.
“Yes,” I said. “Once with the stuntman, once with a dummy.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh . . .” He was looking at the ceiling. Or rather where the ceiling would be, if the store had a ceiling. Bloodrock had built this storefront, and it was just a shell, so it had no roof at all except for some tarps hung to keep the light out.
“Now,” Perkins said, “I need that ladder.”
We spent the next twenty minutes in the freezing cold running around looking for a ladder. I was losing my patience, I have to admit. I was cold and I was tired and I was hungry and it was nearly ten o’clock at night. Finally, we found a goddamned ladder.
Perkins put the ladder inside the storefront and used it to climb onto the roof of the adjacent building. He got up there, stood for a moment, and then climbed down.
“Fine,” he said. “We can go now.”
“Go where?”
“To the Holiday Inn, of course.”
* * *
A man can take only so much. Driving back in the car, I asked him what was going on, and he didn’t answer, and I lost my temper.
“Look,” I said, “it’s bad enough I’ve had to follow you around for two days and listen to all your cryptic questions, but now you drag me all the way out here in the middle of the night and the only explanation you can give me is that you’re trying to prevent another murder.”
“I was merely trying to stimulate your curiosity,” Perkins said.
“Well, it worked,” I said. “I’m curious.”
“So am I,” Perkins said. “Now, I won’t see you in the morning. I’ll meet you at the location. So don’t go looking for me tomorrow, all right?”
“All right,” I said.
“Everything will be just fine,” Perkins said. And then the son of a bitch patted my hand.
* * *
Back at the hotel, Claude was waiting for us in the lobby. He went over to Perkins. “I have the girl you wanted to see.”
“Oh, excellent,” he said. He was smiling. Harlow Perkins was actually smiling. “You want to come?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. I was still in a sour mood. “I want to eat dinner.”
“Fine, I’ll see her alone. Where is she?”
“In the production office.”
“Fine,” Perkins said. He went off with Claude. I went to the dining room to eat some dinner. I didn’t know who the hell he was going to see, but I was through for the night, let me tell you.
Then I got into the dining room and discovered that the kitchen was closed.
I was so mad I couldn’t see straight. I made a little bit of a scene, and the waitress said she’d try to get me a steak sandwich.
I said that was fine, and it was—I’d have eaten anything at that moment.
She brought me a Scotch and disappeared, and I sat alone in a booth and drank it and listened to my stomach growl.
The Scotch made the growling worse and didn’t improve my mood.
I was still grumpy when in walked Sally.
She was crying.
I was the only person in the dining room, and she apparently didn’t notice me.
She walked to a side table and sat down and put her head in her hands and bawled.
I stared at her for a while, feeling like the world had gone crazy.
For one thing, Sally was never unhappy. She was never happy either.
She was never anything except sort of placid. Now here she was, crying.
But also, she was never out of her room after nine or ten at night. And she was certainly not out without Charles Mann. So it was crazy to see her here alone at night.
I finished my drink, wondering if she would look up and notice me, but she didn’t so I went over and sat down next to her. She looked up at me and said, “Oh, it’s you.” The tears were running down her cheeks. She was beautiful. I couldn’t help but feel a certain heart-wrenching empathy.
I said something clever like, “What’s the matter, Sally?”
She said she wanted to die, and she sobbed some more. I said she should come sit at my table, and I helped her up and steered her over to the booth. She sat down and kept on crying. I kept asking her what was the matter, and she kept saying she wanted to die.
And then finally she said, “He hit me.”
“Who?”
“Charles. He hit me.” Her voice made it sound like it was the strangest thing in the world, something unthinkable, like all the water in the world turning to ice.
“Why?” I asked. I can’t help it. Crying women make me uncomfortable; I felt clumsy and stupid.
“Because,” she said. A typical Sally answer.
My steak sandwich came. I asked her if she was hungry. She shook her head. I asked for another Scotch, a double.
“I want one too,” she said.
“Two double Scotches,” I said.
The waitress went away.
“Why’d he hit you?” I asked again.
“I just want to die,” she said.
She continued crying, and normally I would have lost my appetite. But the truth is, I was starving, so I ate and watched her cry. The drinks came and she gulped hers like it was soda and made a face, then insisted on another.
“Maybe you better not.”
“You shut up,” she said.
I shut up, mostly out of pure astonishment. Sally never said anything like that in her life. The astonishment got greater when the next thing I felt was her hand on my knee.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean that.” Her hand was there, rubbing. Rubbing . . .
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I’m not a bad girl.”
“No, no,” I said. “Of course not.” I could hardly think about anything except the hand on my knee.
“Charlie thinks I’m bad,” she said.
“You’re not bad.”
“No, I’m not bad.” Her hand moved up my leg. “I was always nice to you,” she said.
“Yes, Sally.”
Now here’s a funny thing. It should have been very exciting, but it wasn’t. It was uncomfortable and a little freaky, and you know, dangerous. I mean, I kept expecting Charles Mann to come bursting into the dining room, and there I was with Sally and her hand on my knee.
The other problem was that Sally was acting like a different person, somebody who I didn’t know at all, and it was strange to find out that somebody you thought you had pegged is something else entirely.
Her hand was still rubbing.
“Sally,” I said, “you must be pretty upset.”
“You’re so nice to me,” she said.
“Sally,” I said, and I sort of croaked, because her hand was getting up there. I didn’t want to squirm away, but I had to do something. I ended up spilling my drink by accident. It really was an accident. She moved away while I mopped up the mess.
“Gee,” she said, sniffling.
By now she was on her next double Scotch, and she was slurring her speech. I thought, This is all happening so fast. It seemed like five minutes ago I was sitting alone in the place, and suddenly Sally was drunk and all over me.
“Kiss me,” she said, leaning in close. “Kiss me.”
“Sally . . .”
“Don’t you like me?”
“Sally, I think you’re a wonderful girl.”
“Everybody else likes me.”
“Sally . . .”
She stopped and put her hands on her hips. “You’re as bad as Arthur,” she said. “All talk and no play. He kept talking about it, but he would never do anything.” And then she giggled. “For a while.”
“What happened with you and Art?”
She giggled again. “I used to meet him sometimes in his room, when Charlie was away.”
“Very often?”
“Sometimes,” she said, and giggled some more. “But he wasn’t very nice,” she said, turning sober at the recollection. “Clete is nicer.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And Billy is nice too.”
That was the cameraman. I found myself wondering who else she thought was nice, and probably she would have told me except that she suddenly turned pale, and said, “I feel sick,” and got up and ran out of the room.
The waitress came back and collected my plates. “You want coffee, or what?” she asked.
I was watching Sally run for the bathroom. “Just a check,” I said.
“She’s crazy, that one,” the waitress said, and walked away.