"You should see him play at rehearsals." Sean waved a piece of bread to make her point.
Dominic looked at me. "You play Time Bomb with your actors?"
"Say that again, Dominic, but look at Max this time."
"Weber, we're having dinner conversation. Will you put the camera down?"
All of them grumbled he was right, so I did as I was told, but under protest because it had been such a pleasure. Sometimes we used a video camera in New York, but that was like shooting game films for athletes; we watched them to see what mistakes we'd made. The stuff I was shooting now was only "family" and fun and addictive for someone who liked to look through a camera anyway. I had an idea in the back of my mind to make a little film of the night's festivities and then send copies of it to everyone there.
"What's the newest on Blow Dry, Dominic?"
"Wait a minute. I got to get some more of these baked beans. Who made them? We gotta get the recipe, Mickey."
"Max."
"Max? Shit, you make beans like this and play Time Bomb too?"
"Dominic?"
"What?"
"Blow Dry?"
"Oh, yeah. Nothing! Creepiest thing about B.D. was he had no vices. No girlfriends, didn't gamble, drank a beer once a month. Usually when someone disappears, you try to find out if they bought a ticket to Vegas or Acapulco. This guy didn't do those things."
"He just scared people."
"Yup! And that's the only thing we have to go on. He didn't have vices, but he had a fuck-load of enemies. There are a number of people down at the department who think B.D. might have seen his last Dodger game."
"Does that bother you?"
He wiped his mouth with a napkin. "Normally it would, but Charlie Feet . . . Christ, if you even called him Charlie by accident he'd give you a look that'd make your toes curl."
A that's-the-end-of-that-subject silence fell over us – until James laughed loudly. "Yeah, but he would've made a gr-r-eat Bloodstone!"
Dessert was Mickey Scanlan's Poodle Cake, which was an astounding piece of work. She told us not to ask the ingredients or else we wouldn't eat it, but no one had any trouble doing that.
After two pieces and a cup of Sasha's weak coffee, I picked up the camera and started filming again. Going from person to person, I asked them to guess what was in the cake.
Wyatt smiled at the camera while squeezing chewed dessert through his teeth. I moved on quickly.
Sean said chocolate and prunes and shrugged. James said chocolate and raisins. Dominic said chocolate and Blow Dry.
Mickey threw her spoon at him but laughed as hard as the rest of us. I panned from face to face, going in as close as I could on each, then pulling back and moving to the next but trying to catch all their faces before the first real waves of laughter had crested and begun to fall.
When I got to Max I thought he was laughing so hard he had lost all control and simply dropped his plate and fork into his lap.
But it was worse, and that moment of recognition was where one of those feared animals I spoke of before suddenly rose in me and leapt.
For seconds, long important seconds, I knew something was terribly wrong with my friend Max Hampson, but I did nothing – besides filming him. I needed a few more seconds of the camera at my eye before I could help him. Before I would help him. That's right – before I would help him.
Wyatt yelled, "Hey, what's the matter with Max? Look at him! He's sick!"
I dropped the camera but way too late. In the following chaos, no one knew what I'd done. But did it matter? I knew.
Driving to the studio the next morning, I saw her standing at a bus stop.
"Why aren't I surprised to see you?"
"Max is going to be all right, Weber. I promise. You didn't do anything bad."
"I didn't help."
"You were doing your film. Don't you understand yet that's the most important thing you can do? If it's good in the end, then everything else will be okay. I can help you now. I've been allowed. Since you came back here, I've been able to do some things. Max will be okay."
"Prove it."
"Call the hospital. Get Dr. William Casey and ask him about Max's condition. I'm not lying, Weber."
"What about Blow Dry?"
"He's dead. He was killed in east Los Angeles by a gang called the Little Fish. They'll find his body today."
"Did it have anything to do with this? With Midnight Kills?"
"No."
"Pinsleepe, tell me what it is they want. Please."
"I can't tell you because I don't know. I was told to come talk to Phil and I did. Unsuccessfully. Then I was told to talk to you."
"Who sent you?"
"The 'good animals.'"
I pulled into an abandoned lumberyard and turned off the motor. "You know about that?"
"The more work is done on the film, the more I know you. The image of animals isn't far from the truth; it's just a lot more complicated than that. Remember what Blow Dry said the other day? About evil? That it's not some thing; it's everything, turned bad? He was right."
"I don't understand."
"Midnight Kills. You saw it – it's not very good. Nine tenths of it is a normal Saturday night horror film. But then Phil did something, found a trick or a piece of genius, and wrote a scene that turned everything bad –"
"He made a work of art."
"He made three minutes of art, but it was enough."
"I don't believe that. I don't believe art comes to life."
"It doesn't. But do you know about binary weapons? Nerve gas is usually built as a binary weapon. You have one chemical here and one over there. Separately they're harmless, but combined they become nerve gas."
"Those killings in Florida –"
"That was nothing compared to this."
She asked me to drop her off at a flower store on Sunset. As I was pulling away from the curb, the first idea came to me. I began talking fast and urgently into a little pocket tape recorder I carry whenever I am working.
I stopped once on the way at a telephone booth and called the hospital to find out about Max. A Dr. Casey said it was one of the most unbelievable recoveries he'd seen in his entire medical career. He was about to go on when I thanked him and hung up.
3
I reached over and started to turn on the light, but Wyatt stopped me.
"No, don't do that. I want to see it again."
"What do you think?"
"I think it's brilliant and sick. It's what those films should have been. But show it to me again." He put a hand on my shoulder. "You really are a director, Weber. Your style is so distinctive. God, I wonder what Phil would have said if he'd seen that."
"Look again and tell me what else you think." Leaning forward, I pressed the play button.
For days I'd worked both at the studio and at home cutting and pasting and generally rearranging the three and three quarter Midnight films into one rough Gregston version.
Why? Because I was sure Pinsleepe was hinting at something important when she'd repeated Blow Dry's "evil is everything, turned bad." Phil may have found the magic to create the lost scene, but who was to say there wasn't another magic in what he'd already made?
In college, Strayhorn and I took a course together called Ancient Rome. One of the few things I remember about it was the haruspex, a kind of diviner who based his predictions on inspection of the entrails of sacrificial animals. Study the order of the world carefully, and you'll be able to figure out its secrets.
What if I studied the order of Phil's work? Moved it around like a designer or an architect, giving it new angles and edges. Were the answers there? Enigmas to be solved, or only the corny splatter and glop of horror movies?