Long Shot (39 page)

“I don't know what I should tell you,” said Max, sauntering up the room as if in search of a podium. “I've still got to cut five minutes,” he said, “and I don't know where to start. It's down to the bones already. You tell me.”

By which he didn't mean to imply that he valued their opinions. He was trying to say the film was perfect, just the way it was.

“Are there any questions?”

There were not.

“An audience after my own heart,” he said with a gelid smile. “A man's art speaks for itself—right?”

He headed back now to start it rolling. She didn't dare turn to watch him go, but as he passed, she took in the briefest glimpse of him from the corner of one eye. She saw, as if on a single frame of footage, his pale patrician features in repose. He had the slightly parted lips of a man forever lost in speculation.
Don't
, she scolded herself,
don't think of him
. She locked eyes front, on the square of white, till she shut him out entirely.

The overhead light snapped off. The projector began to purr. A splatter of film went on the screen—dark flashes and bits of gray, like rain. It shook and fluttered, and then came clear. It opened on a long shot, down into an empty prison yard. For a moment, they were there as much as here.

And then they made a break for it. Greg took her hand as he leapt up. She saw the first title come on—
A MAXIM BREARLEY FILM
—as he pulled her to her feet. She could feel the film's light ripple across them both the moment she stood to follow. They lit up like sitting ducks.

“Viv—what's wrong?” called out the director.

She and Greg were already at the door. They pushed it hard and swung it back. She couldn't stand the sound of Brearley whining. She thought she'd scream if she heard another before they were safe outside.

“Hey,” Max shouted, “are you sick or something?”

They flung the door shut behind and ran. The running was all their own idea, since nobody else came bursting out. They weren't being trailed at all. But the sped-up pace must have made them think they would save some time at the other end. As if they needed every second they could get. They flew back down the corridor and thundered up the stairs. Then across to the leather-bound study and out the French doors into the night. The Japanese plums were all in bloom as they streaked along the garden alley that led to the redwood tub.

They'd arrived at the scene of the crime at last.

No doubt they would have been quick to deny they'd done so by design—though there wasn't a soul still left in the story who'd have let it go at that. They panted and leaned against the trees to recover. The night made not the slightest move to rush them along or hunt them down. They had more right to be here now than anyone. If the irony proved to be more than they could bear, they could always say the convenient thing, that the other had taken the lead and tricked them into coming out. But it wasn't so at all. They'd agreed, somehow, without saying a word, to follow this circle end to end. The deal was fifty-fifty.

“Max,” he gasped, as he sat on the rim of the tub to gulp in air. “It's Max.”

She was just as out of breath as he, but she knew she couldn't let it go without a fight. She slumped down beside him, demanding shrilly: “But what about
Carl?
”

“Him too. Max killed them all.”

“But
how?
” she cried—reaching over to grip his arm, as if to keep from falling back.

It wasn't a cool detective's question. She didn't care what the weapons and tricks and setups were, nor how the thing was masterminded. She was saying “How?” to something more—to the whole chaotic round of fate that dogged these men till they tore themselves to bits. She'd always supposed she lived at the center of Jasper's life. All the high-strung apparatus of his dream, and everyone who crossed along it, came within the borders of a country she owned half of. Till now, there were some few things she was sure of.

So how could this be? Maxim Brearley was nobody, wasn't he? Just an oily man they worked with—neither here nor there. She couldn't think where he and Jasper had ever found the time to work up so much violence and passion. How did it ever get started, and she not know it at all?

“There were
four
men lost in the blizzard,” said Greg. He ticked them off on his fingers. “Jasper. Artie. Gary Barlow. And one other guy who got frostbite. Remember? The guy who lost four toes? That's
him
.”

“Max?” she asked, as if she kept forgetting. “
Max
was at Carbon Mountain?”

“Goddam right,” he said forcefully. It was all old-hat to him, it seemed, who'd been over this ground with Artie inch by inch since Monday night. “The reason we never turned him up is he was a year behind. He wasn't even in the club. But Barlow, see, was his lover—which is probably why they let him go on the river trip. It's just a guess. Artie can't remember how he happened to be there.”

She realized he didn't know half what he wanted. He had only the barest bones of the truth.

“I still don't see what it's got to do with killing Jasper now,” she said.

“He always thought it was Jasper's fault,” he replied, as he trailed a hand in the water. He gazed down in as if he meant to read the depths like tea leaves. “In
his
mind, Barlow was murdered.”

How, they couldn't say. Perhaps Max saw Jasper steal an extra ration. Or Jasper worked it out so Barlow got the thinnest bag to sleep in. Who could say, in the snow and dark, what minor shift in the huddle—four men clinging to keep from freezing—might send one of them over the edge? Artie swore they were all shut up in a kind of coma the whole night through. He didn't see how anyone could have noticed much of anything. But Max must have got it into his head that Jasper had placed himself above the group. In a word, he had oversurvived—and killed the man beside him in the process.

“The thing is,” Greg went on, “he never said a thing—not then or ever.”

He simply let them take his toes off, gritted his teeth, and came out of the hospital barely limping. Tough in a way that boys admired, so the others all figured he'd put the pain behind him. He nursed it all these years, till it went off like a bomb.

“But how do you
know?
” she persisted. It sounded, for all the world, like a lousy movie.

“Figured it out,” said Greg with a shrug.

Artie and Carl had suspected something for months—throughout the shoot of
The Broken Trail
. They saw that Max and Jasper were on the edge of something irreversible. That once they went ahead and jumped, they'd never make it out alive—not both of them, at any rate. But neither one would speak of it. Whenever Artie tried to bring it up, Jasper dropped a deeper drug and swam away to sea. As the last day loomed for
The Broken Trail
, Artie could almost feel the air go chill, as before a storm. The duel was only hours away.

So he summoned Carl home from New York, and they tried one final time. On April third, from one to five, they begged the boss to get out of town. The horror was plain in his face. He shook like someone who couldn't get warm. But still he denied there was anything there. He fired them both summarily and swore to call his lawyer. Ordered them off the grounds, in fact, though the house was practically theirs as much as his. Then he slammed the door to his room on the roof and placed a call to Bermuda.

Vivien listened soberly, fixing her eyes on a yellowish star that gleamed quite low in the southern sky. She could not name it, for love or money.

“What about all those stories?” she asked quietly—though she harbored little hope that the version
she
knew had survived. It was so indelibly etched in her mind, she could have sworn there were photographs. Jasper and Artie and Carl, arriving in a pickup fresh from nowhere. The frontal assault on Hollywood, and the lucky break that struck them rich. The story told over and over, till it had the effect of historical truth.

“That was just
hype
” Greg said with a certain force, as he shook his hand dry in the cool night air.

Well, of course it was. How odd that she, who had heard every lie in the book embroidered with her name, should have ever believed a word of it.

“The first thing they
did
when they got out here was call up Max,” Greg said. “He'd already put in two years waiting around, and he finally had a foot in the door. Some bullshit job at Fox, where he followed this goof around and kissed his ass. But at least he had a few connections.” He looked her in the eye with an irony whose roots went deeper than the case at hand. “They couldn't have done it alone, you know. Nobody ever does.”

So the four of them worked together, at first. How was it, she thought, that none of them brought up the past? It was as if they thought it would be unmanly to cry over all their losses in Vermont. They pooled their assets and hustled in relays till they clinched the deal for the werewolf picture. But they kept their distance otherwise. Max wasn't part of the magic circle.

It may have been just a fluke of luck, but overnight they were launched. Suddenly, Max and Jasper had no further need for each other. By the time they started granting interviews, they'd each come up with a separate yarn to explain their arrival at the top. By Jasper's account, he and his trusty pals hit Hollywood like sailors on a shore leave. And because they stuck together, all for one and one for all, they won their way to their wildest dreams. Maxim Brearley—scion of a humidification engineer in Tulsa—let it be thought that he grew up riding after foxes. Max had a thing for gentry. Once he got rich, he lived with a checklist, building sets to wander through.

“I
know
that part,” said Vivien, as if to cut Greg off. She stood up abruptly and put a few feet between them. She'd always known that Max was just a pocketbook aristocrat. He'd made himself up out of whole cloth. Yet somehow, that was the very thing she found redeeming. Like Jasper, he shaped the world as he went.

“Go on to Harry Dawes,” she said.

“Ah well,” replied Greg, in a voice that was weary of ambiguities, “that was just bad timing. He hitched a ride down Sunset, and he got picked up by a guy who was out to cast a part. He needed a kid who was new in town.” He shrugged at the rigs of fate. “There's thousands of them out there. They all get screwed, before they're through.”

It seemed she had nothing to add. She set off down the garden as if she could no longer abide these games of chance. Or perhaps she saw no need to linger at a death scene that was done with. However it was, Greg had to scramble to catch up. As he fell into step, he could tell she was suffering no excess of sentiment. Anger, perhaps, but nothing more. She turned and blurted out, as if to let him know how hard the road she traveled was:

“It's not
enough
.”

“What do you want?”

“Why would he want to kill Carl?” she demanded. This was a mere for-instance. She had a hundred more.

“Well, as it turns out,” he said, “that's
your
fault.”

One almost would have thought he meant to make her flinch. To see if the harder edge was real.

“Artie and Carl would have dropped it,” he said. “Jasper knew what was coming, didn't he? He could have shot
first
. When Max dropped by with his hitchhiker friend, he should never have asked them in. A duel's a duel—you let the enemy pour the wine, you better plan on a long night's sleep.”

She started walking again, but not so fast as to shut him out. She let him keep pace on the mossy path, as she willed herself to be satisfied. She had no other option. At the canyon end of the garden, they reached the moon gate. They waited a moment more before going on. The intricate lattice of the double door glimmered like a hieroglyph. Flanked by a night-bloom jasmine left and right, it stood like a final boundary, with the bottomless well of the night beyond.

“Now, it happens I don't agree,” said Greg. “You got an innocent victim here—Harry Dawes. The laws of the duel no longer apply.”

Men's rules, she thought. Women did not play games like this. Yet she understood, deep down, that Jasper must have done the thing that Max believed him guilty of. Ten winters ago, in the teeth of a northeast wind, Jasper went too far. Whatever it was—a sliver of greed, a single word—it had cankered inside him like a crime. There was never a question of his getting off free. In the end, he must have listened for Max's step on the stair behind.

She knew all this without ever asking. Jasper had lived with a sin in his blood, like a taint of tropical fever that made him weak from time to time. Out of focus and half asleep, as if he were under water. Vivien felt it the day she met him. He gave you the sense that he longed to beg your pardon—to break away from the moment at hand and hurry back to something still unfinished. It lived in a windowless room, where he never let anyone in.

“Why me?” she asked, in a neutral tone. “What did
I
do?”

“You went and pinned the murder on him,” Greg replied. Then he rattled the next part off like moves on a chessboard. “Carl goes straight to Max, of course. And Max sees right away how to lock up his alibi. If Carl should die by his own hand, it only goes to prove the widow Cokes's case.”

At “widow,” he pointed a finger at her. He held it steady and cocked his thumb.

“Bang,” he said. “Carl's dead.”

“What are they doing down there?” she asked.

“In the screening room? Well, I guess you could call it murder one.”

“But
how
?”

“Okay—it's got to look like a heart attack, right?” This part wasn't as hard as he expected, not at all. Just tell it step by step, he thought. “First, Artie saps him and knocks him out. There'll be a bruise, but you can't have everything. Artie says he can make it look like he cracked his head when he fell. Then a pillow across his face—like this—and you press down hard. Six minutes, I think we decided. A simple asphyxiation. Nothing grand.”