Jack Best could not reply. His face was trapped in the rigor of his own smile. No matter how hard he attempted to disengage his features from their merry aspect, he was unable to do so. He turned from the young director to the latter’s wife. Patty twinkled back at him. She was holding a Polaroid Instamatic. Rising, she stalked the publicist.
“Now, Jack,” she cooed, “we’ll see what you really truly look like.”
Jack wrenched his jaw into motion.
“Chrissakes,” he protested. “I seen it was a phone, Walter. I mean, chrissakes. I think my glasses … my specs … I seen it was a phone, Walter.”
Now the Drogues inclined together, watching for images of Jack Best to form on the blank print. They seemed rapt.
“When a thing fits in your hand,” Jack explained, “you gotta be sharp. Like the pics. You aren’t sharp, they’ll kick your teeth in. I know, Walter, because I been there. They say — he’s a nice fella and they eat you alive. Walter? Am I right or wrong?”
“Ooh,” Patty Drogue said, “there he is, the old scamp.” She tore free the Polaroid print of Jack’s photograph and handed it to him. Jack looked down into his own smiling face.
“Walter,” he said. “Honest to God, I dealt with the roughest and toughest, and the good of the organization was all that mattered to me. You could ask your father. It was dog cat dog. Murder. A jungle.” He set the ghastly picture of himself on the shelf beside the strange little telephone. Beside it was the pad on which young Drogue had been doodling. On the pad he read the words: “Five Beeg Wons.” He began to weep.
Patty Drogue leveled the Instamatic at him, giving no quarter.
“You shouldn’t,” Jack said. He raised his hands to cover his face but she made the shot. Jack fought for breath.
“It was …” he tried to say. “It was …”
Patty lowered her camera and ran at him. She thrust her face into his. Her voice, when she spoke, was a comic rasp.
“It was money talks — before Marty!” she growled. “It was bullshit walks — before sound!”
She stepped back and pulled out the print of her latest snapshot.
“Oh, see!” she cried as the print came into composition. She showed it to her husband triumphantly as though she were vindicating her position in some point under dispute. “See how he looks?”
Instead of looking at the picture, Drogue looked directly at the cringing man.
“He looks,” the young director said, “like Abbott and Costello are waiting for him.”
A brisk alarming triple knock sounded against the bungalow door. The sound was muted and urgent and had nothing of good news about it.
Walker had been reading New York Arts on the patio while Lu Anne slept. He put the magazine aside and opened the door to Axelrod.
“You’re a stupid fuck,” the unit manager told him.
Walker was taken aback. Openings like Axelrod’s usually presaged a narrative of nights forgotten, and he was quite certain that he could account for the entire period since his arrival.
“Look at this,” Axelrod said, and handed him an envelope of photographs. When he had looked at them, he went back to the patio table where he had been reading and sat back down. Axelrod followed him.
“Taken today, right, Gordon?”
“No question.”
“You never heard of shades?”
Walker looked out to sea. A darkening cloud bank hovered on the horizon, supporting a gorgeous half rainbow.
“Basic precautions, Gordon,” Axelrod said in an aggrieved tone. “A little discretion. You think you have nothing but friends around here?”
“I thought you got to do everything and they didn’t care anymore.”
“Did you, Gordon? I got news for you. Even today there are things you don’t do. You don’t snort in your front window with the shades up. If you do you can find yourself in a seven-million-dollar production without a dime’s worth of insurance. If our insurers, Gordon — you listening to me? If our insurers had these pictures they would cancel our insurance forthwith and this thing could close down today.”
“That’s a worst-case scenario. Is it not?”
“Gordon, Gordon,” Axelrod said with a mirthless smile, “this could have been a bad case. Remember Wright’s picture for Famous? Coke on the set? There was a corporate crisis in New York at Con Intel. The stockholders went apeshit. And it’s not only a matter of insurance. There’s a theory around that ripped people make lousy movies.”
“Lu Anne’s asleep,” Walker said. He rested his cheekbones on his fists and looked down at the uppermost print. “They’re in color,” he said. “That’s far out.”
“What did you think, asshole? That they’d have a black border? Look at yourself. You look like a vampire.”
Walker found the image troubling.
“The drinking straw came out nice. Like a little barber pole.” He looked up at Axelrod. “Who took them?”
“Jack Best.”
Walker nodded. “I thought it might have been Jack. Trying to relive his heroic past.”
“He used to get pictures back for us all the time. If you wanted pictures back you went to him. Half the time he probably set the people up.”
“I was teasing him a little.”
“You were stepping on his balls a little. He claimed his principals wanted five thousand dollars. Depression prices. So I went over and yelled at him and he folded up.”
“Didn’t Walter believe him?”
“Only an idiot would have believed him. You could see his mind work through the holes in his head.”
“It’s sad,” Walker said. “I mean, he taught me how to read a racing form. I’m really sorry.”
“He was some schemer,” Axelrod said dreamily. “He got back those famous pictures of Mitchell Drummond and the kid. What’s-his-name who was the child actor that O.D.’d last year. That was his greatest number. He knew all the mob guys and all the cops.”
“Really sad,” Walker said. “Poor Jack. Tell him he can take my picture any time he wants but I wish he’d leave my friends alone.”
“He’s finished, Gordon. He’s going where Winchell and Kilgallen went.”
“A tragedy,” Walker said. “Do we have all the pictures back?”
“He says he put one print under Dongan Lowndes’s door. Seemed kind of funny.”
“It’s a riot. Confidential closed, so he takes them to New York Arts. Van Epp can run them next to Nelson Eddy goosing chorines.”
“It makes no sense,” Axelrod said. “So I thought, well, he’s senile, he’s out of it …”
“Do we have to worry about what Lowndes thinks of us?” Walker asked. “He’s supposed to be a gentleman. He’ll give us the picture back.”
“Gordon,” Axelrod said, “let me tell you something that’s also funny. I just tossed the gentleman’s room again. I went through his gear as completely as I could without leaving traces. The print’s not there.”
“Maybe Jack was lying.”
“I don’t think so.” Axelrod took a chair in the shade. “I think Lowndes has it. If he was going to give it back he would have done it by now.”
“That’s not very nice of him,” Walker said. “But then he isn’t very nice, is he?”
“Not in my opinion. In my opinion he’s a smart prick.”
“He’s worse than that,” Walker said. “He’s an unhappy writer.”
Axelrod mixed himself a drink from the setup on the umbrella-shaded table beside him.
“It’s not good,” he said. “These shots kick around — sooner or later they end up in print.”
Walker watched the sea-borne rainbow fade into blue-gray cloud.
“It wouldn’t hurt this picture,” Axelrod went on. “It wouldn’t help you much. But I wouldn’t think it could hurt you much either.”