“Billy, then. You used to direct movies, right?”
“That was a long time ago. All the sweet silly birds of our youth, surely they’ve flown by now. Mine have, at any rate. Yours?”
Lonnie smiled. “Occasionally they still come home to roost. When they do, I try to make sure they get fed.”
“Good for you. Speaking of which: I haven’t served you all yet, have I? I really should attend to that.” After gazing out the window for a moment, he went on. “It was a much smaller world back then. Everything was simpler. You had this feeling anything was possible-anything at all. I think I fancied myself a modern Shakespeare, half-owner of the Globe and running it, directing and acting in the very plays I wrote. I could do it all, create my own world. Create and inhabit it.”
“He hasn’t seen or thought of those movies in years. They have nothing to do with who he is now. You should not be bringing this in here, into our home. You know that, Henry.”
All our heads turned to the source of the voice.
Sammy Cash stood at the foot of the stairs.
Chapter Thirty-five
He wore loose khaki slacks, a pink oxford-cloth shirt from which the left collar button was missing, oxblood loafers, possibly Italian, without socks.
“Billy’s offered refreshments, I assume?”
“He did. But then he kind of got off track.”
“He does that. I won’t say it’s good to see you, Henry, it never is. Who are these people you’ve brought?”
“I’m the sheriff who answers to Henry Lee,” Lonnie said. “Mr. Turner here is a consultant, helping me with an investigation. No reason you’d know this, but someone’s driven murder right up on our steps and parked it there.”
“In which case you should be off doing your job.”
Lonnie glanced down at sockless feet, up to the missing button.
“I appreciate the fact this is your home, sir,” he said, “and that I’m an intruder here.”
Cash nodded.
“What you have to appreciate is that this is a murder investigation. Statutes give me a lot of latitude. Take me about eight seconds flat, for instance, to have you down on that polished wood floor in cuffs.”
“Lonnie, surely-”
“You shut the fuck up too, Henry. Obstruction of justice’s a big door. Don’t make me open it.”
“Oh dear,” Billy said.
Lonnie sat beside him on the mauve couch. He’d snagged the milk punch on the way, and handed it to him. “I agree completely. Now.” He looked from face to face. Mayor Sims, Billy Roark, the man we only knew as Sammy Cash. “Who’s going to tell me what happened?”
Billy Roark was fourteen years older than Henry Lee, out of the house and gone by the time Henry Lee was coming up, but always a role model-for that very reason if for no other. Because he’d reached escape velocity, you see, escaped the drag of the town they’d both grown up in, left behind the broken, near-mute mother and the fathers, gentle but long absent in Billy’s case, violent in Henry Lee’s. Billy Roark had gone up to Memphis at age nineteen and bluffed his way into selling furniture at Lowenstein’s. Third day on the job he sold a houseful of it, a whole goddamn houseful, prime quality all, to an older, balding man and a magnificently stacked young blond. A runner was sent to the bank with the check and came back to report it was good. “I could use a man like you,” the customer told him. A week later Billy found himself in a bright red Fairlane, coursing between El Paso and Dallas, flogging movies to drive-ins and main-street theaters with names like Malco and Paramount. He was a natural, able to turn on a dime, become whatever the customer seemed to expect of him. Theatre owners loved him and took whatever he had to offer. Soon a Cadillac replaced the Fairlane-a used Cadillac, and one day in of all places Fate, Texas, Pop. 1400, it broke down. Not much to do in Fate. He had breakfast at Mindy’s Diner, lunch there a few hours later. Then he found himself at the Palace watching a film about a woman’s prison. Jesus, he thought, this is what I’ve been selling? It was awful. He sat there watching, running numbers in his head. Obviously he was at the wrong end of the business. By six P.M., when he drove out of Fate with a new distributor cap and fuel pump, into a blood-red sunset, he’d blocked out what he was going to do. He found a place he could rent cameras, lights, the whole works, then some kids at a local college who’d been doing stage plays and figured how different could it be. Talked his current girlfriend, Sally Ann of the dirigible, gravity-defying breasts, into starring. Then over a weekend in a motel in New Braunfels, cartons of cigarettes, bags of hamburgers and bottles of Scotch ever to hand, not to mention Sally Ann, he roughed out a script. Devil Women of Mars. And it had, by God, everything. Scenes of small-town American life. Long shots of empty Arizona sky. Suspense. A message. Cleavage. Butts pushed up intriguingly by high-heel silver boots. When Billy drove out of New Braunfels that Monday, hungover in a borrowed car since he’d sold the Cad to get money for equipment rental, Sally Ann snoozing beside him, he was a new man. Everyone on his route, El Paso, Las Cruces, Midland Odessa, Midlothian, Cockrel Hill, Duncanville, signed up for Devil Women of Mars. That next weekend, in an abandoned aircraft hangar outside Fort Worth, they shot the thing.
“It holds up, even now,” Sammy Cash said. “I’m the guy who fills the gas tank when the kids pull into the Spur station. I see this thing in the back of the pickup and start backing away. Audience never sees it, all they have to go on is my reaction. The gas nozzle falls out. One of the kids goes to light a cigarette. I was in the first one he made, I was in the last one. He is a genius, you know.”
Billy started cranking them out like no one had seen. He’d take a motel room for the weekend and emerge with a script, shoot the thing Monday through Wednesday, edit it that night and the next day, have it to the processors by late Thursday, out in the world the following week. Science fiction, horror, crime movies, prison films, teen exploitation. Sally Ann never appeared onscreen, nor remained long in Billy’s life, after Devil Women of Mars. Most of the actors were amateurs, lured away from college and community-theatre productions or from porn films for a day or two, Sammy Cash (real name Gordie Ratliff) being the exception. He’d had small parts in several low-end Hollywood movies and proudly carried a Screen Actors Guild card. But when the guild found out he’d appeared in a nonunion film and busted him, he decided right then and there that their gentlemen’s agreement was over. Never paid the fine, never looked back. And never again used any other name than Sammy Cash.
“It was as though the experience liberated him,” Billy Roark said. “Before, he’d been a good journeyman, always dependable, you knew he’d show up on time, stay however long he was needed, get the job done. But then Sammy just… flowered. Soon everyone wanted him. Film after film-all of my own, those of half a dozen other filmmakers as well-he was brilliant, stone brilliant. Whatever the part.
All but imperceptibly at first, though, things began changing. TV became a six-hundred-pound linebacker flattening the opposition, providing, free and in one’s own home, what B and lesser movies could provide only cheaply. Locally owned movie houses disappeared or were bought up by chains who in turn found themselves forced to bid high on upcoming Hollywood product and then, scrambling to meet expenses, to block bookings in every possible theatre. Meanwhile, costs of film, equipment rental and essential facilities such as editing studios increased astronomically. A few filmmakers held on. Till the bitter end.
“And by our toenails,” Billy Roark said. “Those days won’t ever come again.” He looked up. “Did we ever get you drinks? No? We really should do that. I’m afraid we’re a bit out of practice vis-a-vis entertaining.”
“He doesn’t like to talk about all that,” Sammy Cash said. “Rarely thinks much about it anymore.”
The sadness in his companion’s eyes belied him even before Billy spoke.