“Uh, sure,” I said, fishing for pocket change. “But I don’t have much.”
“I don’t want money,” he said, peering past me into the apartment.
“No?” Stepping out onto my balcony, I eased the door almost shut behind me, not so much concerned about my caller as sullen that all this was cutting into nap time. “What then?”
“I just need to use your cell phone.”
“Don’t have one,” I confessed, that alone grounds enough to get me drummed out of the Screenwriters Guild.
I like being unplugged and got rid of my cell last fall, long after it had stopped ringing.
“I need to call the police.”
My interest piqued, I finally noticed the expensive 35mm camera with telephoto lens slung over his shoulder. Camera Guy didn’t reek of booze or dumpster-diving.
“Why?”
“I’m in trouble. Please, one quick call?”
I nodded and said I’d get my cordless. He started to follow me inside, but curiosity doesn’t mean all caution to the wind. I ordered him to wait, ducked inside, and considered throwing the deadbolt and returning to bed.
But ignoring Camera Guy might spark a rage he could vent on my ’67 Mustang, defenseless in the driveway below.
Plus, he’d managed to rouse my long-slumbering muse, now starting to riff about an old hippie packing an expensive camera, but without change enough for a pay phone. I stood pondering all this in the living room until Camera Guy knocked again. Best not keep my new collaborator waiting.
He accepted the phone and announced, “Four-one-one,” while punching in digits. “Yes, Operator,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the motel up the street. “Please connect me to the Boston Police Department.”
Boston? I was so intrigued now that it didn’t occur to me that I’d be footing the long distance.
“Damn.” He mashed the OFF button. “It didn’t go through.”
“Why Boston?” I asked, taking back the phone. “Why not the local cops?”
“Long story.” He plunged his hands into pockets that bulged with what looked like film canisters. “You wouldn’t believe it anyway.”
“Try me.”
“Okay.” He licked thin lips and announced, “I’m Jay Maxwell Marshall.”
“Hi, Jay. Tim Wolfe.”
We shook as he again gazed up the street. “My family owns a fair-sized chunk of Boston.”
“Landed gentry, eh? So, you out slumming?”
“I haven’t seen them in years,” he said dismissively. “My brother Cal tracked me down ‘cause our mom just died.”
“Sorry,” I said, reminded of my Alzheimer’s-addled mother, tended to by the Stokley clan back East. She always believed in me, offered encouragement to flee the Rust Belt and follow my star. “You are my brightest child, Timmy, the one who doesn’t belong here.” She even understood my need for reinvention, that little Timmy Stokley, caterpillar from Ashton, Ohio, had to emerge from the So Cal chrysalis as Tim Wolfe, screenwriter.
I felt guilty about Mom getting sick, but couldn’t help her until I was back in the chips. I hadn’t penned a hit in the six years since my Oscar-nominated script for Teenage Wasteland, and the Hollywood suits had written me off like a bad debt. Only a home run could get me back in the game, and now fate had delivered Camera Guy to my door.
“Never liked my mother,” he was confessing. “But going home for the funeral seemed important.”
“Sure.”
“I booked a flight, but blew the money Cal wired me before picking up the ticket.”
“On that?” I pointed to the Nikon.
“No, I’ve always had cameras, my armor against the world’s unending bullshit. Words can be spun to serve any lie, Tim, but pictures tell the truth.”
Toil in Hollywood and you quickly learn that film is the most convincing friend a lie ever had. My enthusiasm ebbed as I realized no streetwise wisdom would be forthcoming. Jay Max was just another deluded schlub, but I couldn’t dismiss him just yet, not with any chance that the rough ore of his life could be mined for fictive gold.
“So what’s with the cops?” I asked, steering him back toward the plot. “And why Boston?”
Jay glanced down at his camera, stroked the lens. “You got me in trouble again, huh? But then the truth usually does.” His head snapped up suddenly, hazy eyes coming into sharp focus. “They need to bury the truth, Tim, and me along with it. That’s why the wanted poster’s at the post office.”
“You’re starting to lose me, Jay. What wanted poster?”
“People think they don’t have them at the post office anymore, but people just have lazy eyes. The posters are still there, tacked to corner bulletin boards, taped here and there among the long rows of boxes...”
Jeez, I thought, he rambles more than me. “A wanted poster of who?”
“A very bad man, charged with terrorism and plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. Funny.” Jay laughed, a jagged titter that sounded like he was about to vomit up broken glass.
“Yeah, terrorism is a scream.”
“No, funny because the picture was of me.”
“Oh-kay.” Realizing that I was jawing with a full-blown paranoid, I made sure the door was still cracked open, line of retreat clear should Jay’s cork pop completely. “But of course you’re not guilty.”
Again he surveyed the street behind us. “No, but plenty of bogus evidence has doubtless been cooked up to prove otherwise.”
“Sure,” I agreed.
“The real evidence is here.” He patted the film canisters in his pocket. “It’ll disappear, unless I can get it into the right hands. I was calling an old friend who maybe could help, a police captain in Boston.”
“Try him again,” I said, offering the phone.
“My old man was a spook years ago, CIA, before joining the family banking biz,” Jay said, words rushing out of him now. “He drank when Mom was away, told enough stories for me to know the Company’s involved in this somehow. Well, I’ll show ’em.” He grinned, a slash of yellow teeth. “I’ll call their worst enemy.”
“Osama?”
“No,” he said, hitting 411 again, “the FBI.”
Jay asked to be connected to the Federales in D.C., and I wondered if J. Edgar’s ghost, flitting through the Hoover building in a slip, would peg Camera Guy as just another screw-loose subversive, or something more. Rare clay, perhaps, like Lee Oswald or Jim Jones...
“Shit. Three rings, then it disconnected. Should have known they’d be monitoring my calls.”
“Really?” Willing to play along up to a point, I now had to pose the obvious question. “How could they know you’d call from my phone? They use remote viewing or what?”
“Naw.” Jay waved away occult suggestions. “They have my voice print, so simply auto-scan all telecom for a match, then pull the plug.”
“Uh-huh.” Why argue? When cornered by logic, a paranoid drops through a mental trap door, parachuting safely to la-la land below. So much for a plausible thriller. Camera Guy would have to be played for yucks.
“You call them.” Jay thrust the phone at me. “It’s my only chance to slip under the radar. Make the call, Tim, please.”
And say what? “Hi, Tim Wolfe here, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, please hold for a real wingnut.” Nope. Time to wrap the scene.
Thanks for the inspiration, Jay, but I’d take over now; I was already mentally casting Crispin Glover or Johnny Depp as my Jay Max McBum. Camera Guy’s fantasy would be morphed into my own.