Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs (10 page)

Mrs. de Guzman hurried back into the room with a fluffy white towel and handed it to me.

“Can I pour you some coffee, hon? Or, do you drink coffee yet? I don't think it's good for you girls, but Chelsea loves her lattes, and when I was a girl in the South we drank coffee with chicory—”

“That sounds good,” I said. I didn't know what chicory was. Maybe it was like cinnamon?

“Oh Minerva, it was! We loved our chicory.”

She pulled out two blue coffee mugs and set them on the counter. Mrs. de Guzman was obviously one of those grown-ups who enjoyed hearing herself talk, which was fine by me.

“Do you know when Chelsea will be home?”

“Not for a while, I'm afraid. She and her dad are playing eighteen holes this morning. Cream and sugar? It's a terrible habit to get into, cream and sugar, nothing but empty calories. But it's the only way to drink coffee at your age, right?”

“You read my mind.”

Mrs. de Guzman laughed, too. When she smiled, I saw she had some lipstick smeared on her front tooth. “Well, at least I can read someone's mind! Between my daughter and my husband … well, it's been a little tense around here since we returned from London. Chelsea told you about our little situation?”

“Yeah, she did,” I said.

Mrs. de Guzman disappeared into the pantry for a moment and returned with some of those crumbly wedge-shaped cookies called biscotti. I hid a smile. Quills called biscotti Human Dog Biscuits.

“Louis is fit to be tied, of course, but it's his own fault. He's been doing this for decades, trying to avoid
paying the exorbitant prices Brinks charges for transport, and insurance, customs clearance. Of course, he also does it for the sheer fun of it. I've carried diamonds into the country in my dental floss case before! Anyway, this is the chance he took not using the proper channels.” She took a sip of her coffee and sighed. “I do miss my chicory.”

“I've heard those red diamonds are really rare and valuable.”

“Ohhhhh, yes,” she said.

“The person whose ring it was for must be, like, really upset,” I said. It was a lame thing to say, but I didn't want the conversation to veer back into Mrs. de Guzman's girlhood coffee-drinking experiences. I took a small sip of coffee. Ugh.

Mrs. de Guzman rolled her eyes. “Well, that's the silly thing. It's not as if the diamond was for a girl's engagement ring, or even an anniversary or eternity ring. It was for Rodney von Lager's new movie.”

Rodney von Lager was a local Portland guy who made independent films. Mostly, they were shot here in town using real people as actors. He was famous for being anti-Hollywood, but every once in a while he would make a big Hollywood movie that would get nominated for an Academy Award, which made him more famous. But he always came back to Portland.

“I heard he was shooting something here this summer.
My brother's band played a few songs for that movie he did,
53 Miles West of Venus.
Quills thought it would mean a record deal for his band, but the movie pretty much sank like a stone.”

“Chelsea didn't mention your brother had a band. Would I know it?”

“Humongous Bag of Cashews?”

“Of course.” I could tell she'd never heard of it, but she was somebody's mom, and part of her job was to be polite and encouraging.

“The diamond was for his movie?” I didn't understand. Why would a movie director famous for making artsy low-budget movies need a real diamond?

“He's doing an urban remake of
Lord of the Rings
with street kids. Is that right? Louis knows better than I do. He needed a red diamond for the ring.”

“A real red diamond? Isn't that kind of …” I didn't know what the word was. Out of character? Ridiculous?

Mrs. de Guzman must have read my mind again. “It's pure madness. But apparently Rodney von Lager is known for ‘keeping it real.'” She made quotes with her fingers. “He wanted a real red diamond in the ring mostly to inspire the greed and wonder in his actors. In one of his other movies he shot in a house that was supposed to be like the one he grew up in. There was a window in one of the coat closets, and he delayed the start of production to have an identical window installed in
that closet. And here's evidence of the von Lager madness—
in the movie, they never open the closet door.
”

“So you mean no one ever sees the window?”

“No, ma'am. An absolute waste of money, in my book. I grew up in Louisiana without a pot to piss in—excuse me, but you get my point—and this just burns me up.”

I poured some more milk into my coffee, took another polite sip. Sure, it was bizarre, but I'd heard stories like this before about perfectionist film directors. The bigger question for me was, how did he know Sylvia Soto? Was she working on the movie? Was she his neighbor? His nanny? His girlfriend? Somehow Sylvia knew to be at the airport the day the de Guzmans arrived. Somehow she knew to shadow Chelsea, and to offer to buy her ring straight off her finger. But how?

“Is Rodney von Lager filming in Portland?” I asked.

“Under the Burnside Bridge. The skate park there, I believe. That's the last I heard, anyway. I'm not sure if this situation with the lost diamond has halted production, or what. I overheard Louis suggest that he could rent von Lager a ring from the store—of course, it wouldn't have a red diamond in it, the best Louis could do would be blue or champagne—but von Lager wasn't interested. Those artistic types are so particular. More coffee, honey?”

She talked more about the dogs and their special diets,
and how much work they were, but Louis loved them, well, except Ned, who had a lovely nature, but had disappointed in other ways. I smiled and asked a question here and there. I think Mrs. de Guzman was lonely. She asked me where I was going to go to high school. She asked if I thought Chelsea was too thin. I tried to listen and be polite, but beneath the kitchen counter, where Mrs. de Guzman couldn't see, my legs were bouncing like mad.

Even though Chelsea was off playing golf with her dad, I decided to check out the set. I could be there in ten minutes.

Finally my T-shirt was dry and I'd eaten my Human Dog Biscuit and we'd run out of things to talk about. Outside, through the French doors, I could see Winkin', Blinkin', and Ned, lying on their sides, snoring in the sun. Mrs. de Guzman walked me to the door and told me not to be a stranger. She stood in the doorway of her huge white house waving as I sped off down the street.

Burnside is a long street at the heart of the city that begins in a hilly wooded area west of downtown, runs down a steep hill into a fancy shopping district, then on into Old Town, past the Salvation Army and a bunch of old brick warehouses. On top of the last warehouse before you reach the Willamette River sits the huge neon MADE IN OREGON sign, Portland's famous landmark.
Every night the white outline of our state, with a leaping elk in the center, shines over our city. Burnside becomes a bridge as it passes over the river. A world-famous skate park was tucked beneath the east side of the bridge, not far from Chelsea's house. I knew right where it was.

At a stoplight I called Mark Clark and told him Chelsea and I were going to the mall. I didn't like the mall, but I was glad they invented it. Adults believed girls my age could spend every waking minute there, so it was always a handy excuse.

The light turned green. I pedaled a few more blocks down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, before turning right down a narrow cobblestoned street. Down the hill, I could see the movie set two blocks away. A row of those huge silver movie-set buses were parked at the curb across from the skate park.

The skate park was a swimming pool–like structure whose concrete sides rose up to enclose a collection of vertical ramps, runs, bowls, and keyholes. The curvy stretches of concrete were painted lime green, splattered with random drips of red, pink, and turquoise. This was the best place to skate in all of the northwest; shady and cool in the summer, sheltered from the rain in the winter.

There were clusters of people here and there. Lights rose up on skinny poles above their heads. Once, Quills
took me on the set of
53 Miles West of Venus
and one thing that struck me was how everyone looked alike. The camera people and the sound people and the assistant-type people all wore grubby jeans, T-shirts, grody old Jack Purcell tennis shoes or cowboy boots. The actors looked exactly the same way. No one acting in the movie was dressed as a pirate, or a private eye, or in an evening gown. The only way you could tell the difference between the people making the movie and the people
in
the movie, was that the people making the movie had walkie-talkies on their belts.

It was the same situation with this movie,
The Dude of the Rings.
Everyone here looked like they came from the same nation of semi-grungy art majors.

My plan had been to simply watch, and to formulate a plan while I was watching. While I was riding my bike from the de Guzmans' house I started thinking that Rodney von Lager had maybe hired Sylvia to buy the ring off Chelsea. Or maybe Sylvia and Rodney were partners. Rodney von Lager liked to be thought of as edgy. I remember Quills telling me that in
53 Miles West of Venus
one of the actors was someone who'd just gotten out of prison for robbing a bank. He wasn't a very good actor, but Rodney thought it gave him street cred. Given this, it made perfect sense to me that Rodney von Lager would snitch the red diamond, rather than pay Mr. de Guzman for it.

The problem was, no one in this big crowd of people looked anything like how Chelsea described Sylvia Soto.

I recognized Rodney von Lager from the time Quills took me to visit the set of
Venus.
He had the greasiest hair of all, graying and shoulder length, but was still sort of handsome in that male-model-who-could-use-a-shower sort of way.

He stood in the middle of three boys, explaining something with his hands. They stood in the parking lot next to the park. I couldn't see who he was talking to, but one of the people had a black pug with a rope tied around his neck. The black pug wandered around, getting his rope wrapped around people's legs. Rodney stepped aside to disentangle himself, and I couldn't believe my eyes.

It was Tonio, Sylvia's brother, and the dog with the rope around his neck was Tonio's black pug.

I don't think my mouth dropped open as I stared and stared. Maybe it did. I'd stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, next to the lot where Rodney von Lager was directing his actors, my feet on either side of the bike, gripping the handlebars. What was Tonio doing here? I scanned the crowd again for Sylvia, but there was no Sylvia. Suddenly, I flashed on the calendar on the wall of their apartment, and all the days that said “Tonio—Shooting.” It wasn't shooting practice for a summer basketball league. Tonio had a role in
The Dude of the
Rings.
Maybe it wasn't Rodney and Sylvia who were partners, but Tonio and Sylvia. Sylvia didn't need to be on the set, or know Rodney personally. Here was her brother, on Rodney's set every single day. Suddenly, my stomach hurt.

A small angry girl was marching toward me. She wore her dyed black hair in tiny, angry pigtails. She'd been yelling something at me.

“You'll have to move, we're getting ready to shoot. Excuse me! Miss! We're shooting a movie here. You'll have to move.”

Before I could say anything, Rodney, and then Tonio, looked my way to see what the commotion was.

Tonio raised his dark eyebrows in what could only be recognition.

I must have stood there looking as if I'd just arrived from another solar system. The small angry girl with the tiny black pigtails motioned me across the street. “You can watch from over there.” Then she sighed, shook her head dramatically, so I couldn't miss the point that I was the biggest idiot she'd come across in a long time.

I walked my bike across the street, to where another small knot of people were standing on the sidewalk, opposite the skate park. They were not movie people, but probably friends of the actors, or else people who'd stopped to watch. A lady—she could only be someone's mom, in her pink polo, blue cotton skirt, and enormous sunglasses—was snapping pictures with her digital camera.

We watched Rodney direct the three boys, including
Tonio. He was gesturing with his big hands, then stopped suddenly and held up a finger. He pulled his cell phone from where it was clipped on the belt loop of his jeans and chatted away. The boys stood there, waiting. Tonio picked up the black pug and rubbed the top of his head with his knuckles, staring intently at Rodney von Lager as he talked on the phone.

I watched Tonio watch Rodney talk on the phone. That was how it was with cell phones: People said anything, right out in public, no matter who was listening. What if Mr. de Guzman called Rodney and they talked about the diamond—when and how it was arriving—and Tonio just stood there quietly soaking up the information? Then he went home and told his sister.

Rodney flipped his phone shut, gave a few more instructions, then joined the cameraman behind the camera.

He didn't yell “Action!” but somehow the boys knew to stride into the skate park. They all carried skateboards and wore black knee pads over their jeans, held on with silver duct tape. Then one of the boys—smaller than either Tonio or the other boy and wearing a bright white T-shirt—stopped before the gate, and they argued. Then he walked away. Then Rodney yelled cut. Then they did it again, and again.

“Why are they doing so many takes?” asked someone.

“Rodney is a perfectionist,” said the mom with the
digital camera. “He may not look like one, but he is. He's a true artist.” She sighed.

Our group then began discussing how the scene they were shooting related to
The Lord of the Rings.
One sweaty, red-faced runner in T-shirt and shorts, who'd stop to watch, said he thought the three boys were members of the good street gang. They were like the three hobbits, aligned with the elves, the dwarves, and the other forces for good in
The Lord of the Rings.
They just wanted everyone to live in harmony and skate and have fun. There was also a bad street gang who wanted to run the good street gang out of the skate park. They were like the goblins, orcs, and other forces of darkness. I think Tonio was supposed to be like the hobbit Sam Gamgee, the one who was always following Frodo around like a nervous babysitter. I wasn't sure who, exactly, the black pug was supposed to be. Golem maybe?