“What are you guys talking about?” asked Fletch. “There is no door.”
“There’s always a door,” said Sy Koller, “in your mind.”
“I have embarrassed my daughter,” uttered Frederick Mooney remorsefully. “She resists thinking of me as a bit player. She forgets, or she never knew, all the small things I have had to do… in this business, to keep afloat.”
“Coffee, anyone?” Fletch asked. Lopez had appeared with a pot.
“Global Cable News called again,” Lopez said while pouring out Fletch’s coffee. “A Mister Fennelli. I said I’d give you the message.”
“Thank you.” Fletch smiled at those remaining at table. “At the moment, I don’t think I have anything to report.”
19
After dinner, Fletch found Geoffrey McKensie in the billiard room playing alone.
Fletch chose a cue stick and McKensie triangled the balls.
They played almost through a game without saying anything.
Finally, McKensie said, “Sorry. Fraid I behaved pretty badly at dinner. I ran on like a young lady not invited to the garden party.”
“Not to worry,” Fletch said. “You had some things that needed saying and you said ’em.”
Continuing in the tone of one vexed with himself, McKensie clucked, “What will you Yanks think of us Aussies.”
“Us Yanks will think of you Aussies as lovingly as we always have.” At Fletch’s stroke, the cue ball neatly avoided every other ball on the table.
McKensie sank two and took his third shot.
“Good at sports, too,” Fletch said. “Damn it.” He bounced the cue ball off several, leaving McKensie with a wonderful lay. “Tell me, though—those things you said—were you saying them because you really believe someone in Jumping Cow Productions might really have been gunning for Peterman—or were you just saying them to dump on Koller?”
McKensie took a careful shot and sank two at once.
Fletch hung up his stick.
“I don’t know,” McKensie said. “It’s true—Koller was a good director—back before he sank his integrity in the briney. Nowadays, it doesn’t bother him to shoot a bad script—as long as he gets paid for it. What hurts is that he knows better. It’s also true that Peterman was mucking things up royally. He deserved the cold steel between his ribs.”
Seeing Fletch had quit, McKensie resumed playing by himself and cleaned off the table.
Fletch asked, “Do you think Peterman could have been sabotaging this film on purpose?”
“I can’t think of a reason. Nobody likes to lose money.” McKensie hung up his own cue. “But I’ll tell you, Peterman couldn’t have done more to torpedo that film if he were doin’ it deliberate.”
“Drink?” Fletch asked. “There’s some bad American beer.”
“Brought some scripts with me from home,” McKensie said. “Think I’ll go do some work on ’em. Somethin’ tells me Koller won’t want to continue talkin’ shop with me this night.”
20
Outside in the dark, Edith Howell and Sy Koller were sitting in the comfortable chairs on the cistern sipping large Scotches.
“Do you know,” Edith Howell said to Fletch as he sat down with them, “that Freddy has escaped the premises again?”
“Key West is a good place to go out.”
“He’s like a cat. When you think he’s in he’s out and out in.”
“Gone out for conviviality,” Fletch said. “Do you worry about him?”
“Freddy? Good God, no. He has millions.”
Fletch swallowed what to him was a non sequitur. “Of dollars?”
“Tens of millions. I know that for a fact.”
Fletch shook his head. “Somehow, I thought he was broke. I think Moxie thinks he’s broke.”
“Tens of millions,” repeated Edith Howell. “I know of what I speak. I have friends whose friends are friends of Freddy, if you know what I mean. He has millions all over the world, just lying around.”
“Pity you can’t get your grubby fingers on it all, Edith,” Sy Koller said.
“I’m tryin’, darlin’, I’m tryin’. Did you hear him in there asking the world for a bit part in a movie that’s not even being made? The poor dear. He needs looking after.”
“He’s as crazy as a mosquito in the dressing room of a chorus line,” said Sy Koller. “Gonzo.”
“It’s interesting to know him,” Fletch said.
“That’s because you don’t,” said Edith Howell. “Knowing Freddy is like having a rare disease: shortly the interest pales and what’s left is pain.”
Sy Koller laughed. “Apparently you’re willing to put up with the pain, Edith. For all those millions.”
“For a short while, darling. After all, Freddy’s liver can hardly be made of molybdenum.”
21
“Well, darlings.” Edith Howell picked up her drink and stood up. “If you’re not chatting you might as well be dead, I always say. Or asleep.” Sitting out in the night, she and Sy Koller and Fletch had been silent for two minutes. “So I might as well go to bed.”
After she closed the door to the house behind her, Sy Koller lifted his drink to Fletch and said, “I like my drink, too, you see.”
“You’ve had a hard day,” Fletch said. “Attacked with a knife by one of your actors. Orally attacked by one of your colleagues.”
“Ah, the perils of being a director.” Sy Koller chuckled. “Being a director is like being the father of a large family of berserk children who keep slipping in and out of reality. We get paid for hazardous duty, but not enough.”
“I thought I should tell you,” Fletch said slowly, “that the police know that you and Peterman had a fist fight outside a Los Angeles restaurant three years ago.”
“They do? How do you know that?”
“Talked to Chief of Detectives Roz Nachman this afternoon. She called. She accused me of having hijacked all her prime suspects.”
“I’m a prime suspect?” Koller ran his palm over his stubbly chin and cheeks. “I shouldn’t be.”
“No?”
“Why should I put myself out of a job? Now that Peterman’s dead the future of Midsummer Night’s Madness is dubious.”
“You mean you won’t even finish filming it?”
“Well,” Koller snorted. “Peterman was the only one who seemed to believe in the property.”
“Didn’t you believe in it?”
“Not really. Peterman gave me the script and said he wanted it shot exactly as written.”
“You never even saw McKensie’s script?”
“No. Peterman said it was a pile of dung.”
“Do you think it would have been?”
“Probably not. But it was clear to me that McKensie had every reason in the world to sue Peterman, so how could I ask to use his script? It would confuse matters. You don’t know this business, do you?”
“No.”
“Think of having a career where you have to find a whole new job every six months.”
“Finding a job is the hardest job there is.”
“That’s the director’s life. And the actor’s life. And the set designer’s. It brings a certain element of the frantic to this business. And a great deal of hot air.”
“But don’t you get rich and famous after a while? Able to pick and choose?”
“Seldom. You make a pile of money, and you spend a pile and a half. Because you’re so frantic. You blow it on hot air, keeping up the image. The more money you make the more frantic you become, the more you blow it on hot air and the deeper into debt you go, which makes you more frantic.”
In the trees night birds were gossiping.
“Anyway, the police say you were fighting over a woman.”