“Okay. Okay.” A sense of well-being descends on me. Bruce Kravitz is an absolute wizard at conjuring up that sense of well-being. It’s how he gets things done and how he makes people happy.
“Now,” Bruce says, “you should tell somebody about the body.”
The paranoia returns. “Not the police!” I say.
“No,” Bruce says. “Absolutely not the police, you’re right. Are any of the producers on the premises?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll start calling and I’ll find out. Just sit tight and remember that you’re devastated.”
“Of course I’m devastated!” I say.
“I mean,” Bruce says firmly, “remember that you and Loni were supposed to be an item. It’s your girlfriend that was killed, Sean, your lover. You’ll have to be ready to play that.”
“Right.” In my panic and terror I’d sort of forgotten that everything the public knew about me and Loni was a complete fabrication.
“Can you do that, Sean? Can you play that part?” Bruce sounds like he wants reassurance, so I reassure him.
“Of course I can play that,” I say. “I liked Loni. I found the body. It won’t be hard.”
“Good. Now I’m going to make some calls, and I’ll call you right back.”
Once again Bruce’s voice conjures up that amazing sense of well-being. I thank him and hang up and sit down on a couch, and wait for what happens next.
What happens next is Tom King, the line producer. On a set, the line producer is the person who keeps everything running, who controls the budget and supervises the production—a job that requires the financial acumen of JP Morgan and the relentless tenacity of a TV cop. He’s experienced with big productions like this one, and the horrific, complex troubles they can cause.
He’s knocking on my door just as my phone rings, Bruce telling me he’s on his way. I open the door and let him in.
Tom King is a burly, balding man of fifty. He wears a white cotton shirt and Dockers, and he holds his phone in his hand. There’s an odd little triangular patch of hair on his philtrum, hair his razor had missed that morning.
He has intelligent blue eyes that are looking at me warily through black-rimmed spectacles, as if I might explode if not handled carefully.
“Bruce tells me there’s a problem,” he says.
“The problem is that Loni is dead,” I say a little sharply. Because this isn’t some small issue in catering or shooting schedules that needs to be smoothed out; there’s an actual dead body lying in one of the rooms, and Tom seems to be regarding it less as a violent crime than as a tactical problem.
His blue eyes flicker. “Can you show me?” he asks.
“Why don’t you go and look for yourself?” Because I have no desire to see Loni dead again.
“I only know what Bruce told me,” he says. He is still regarding me warily, as if he’s suspecting me of hallucinating.
Unhinged speculation whirls through my mind. Maybe he’s used to actors going off the rails and hallucinating dead bodies. Maybe this happens to him all the time.
“Please,” he says.
“I’m not going inside,” I say.
“Okay. You don’t have to go in.”
We walk back to Loni’s patio. Her towels are still fluttering in the breeze. Tom steps onto the patio and shades his eyes with his hand to look inside. I stand a good fifteen feet away, where I won’t be in danger of seeing anyone dead.
“The door glass is shattered,” Tom says.
“I did that. The glass broke when I shut the door.”
He looks at the pile of glass and frowns. “I’m sure the code requires safety glass,” he says. Which is a line-producer sort of thing to say.
He gives me a look over his shoulder, seems about to say something, then decides against it. I know what he’s thinking: You broke the glass when you were fleeing the scene of your crime.
Fuck him, I think.
He opens the door carefully and steps inside, and I hear a sudden intake of breath. I step onto the patio, feeling the cool breath of air-conditioning escaping through the door, and as my eyes adjust to the shade I see Tom bent over Loni’s body. He’s touching her leg. He straightens, still looking down at the corpse.
“She’s cold,” he says. “She’s been here a while.”
Which lets me off the hook, as he well knows. He straightens and looks at me.
“Sean, I’m sorry,” he says.
“What happened?” I ask. “Do you have any idea?”
Now that he’s actually in the room, he doesn’t want to look at the body. I don’t want to look at it, either. We stare at each other instead. And then I glance past his shoulder, and I see the bullet hole in the wall behind him.
“Look,” I say, pointing.
Tom steps to the wall and examines the bullet hole. My mind is starting to recover from its shock, and I’m able to process a few of the facts.
“The bullet went through the glass door,” I say, “and it hit Loni, and then it kept on going into the next room.”
He looks at the hole, and he nods, and then at the same instant the same horrifying thought occurs to the both of us. He spins around, his blue eyes wide.
“Who’s in the next room?” he asks.
We sprint clean around the building. I’m out of breath by the time I come to the room on the other side from Loni’s, with its neat cardboard sign, E. COUSTEAU.
“Emeline,” I pant. She’s one of the set dressers, a French-Canadian from Montreal. I jump onto her patio, and the sliding glass door is open, so I just walk in.
“Emeline!” I call. No answer. There’s a faint, sweet smell in the air.
At least there’s no body on the floor. But I find the bullet hole easily enough, and looking from the hole to the door, it’s clear that the bullet punched through the wall and flew out through the open door.
“What’s back there?” I ask, waving an arm.
“Swimming pool, and tennis courts beyond,” Tom says. “And if a bullet hit anyone out there, we’d know about it by now.”
“Emeline!” I call again, and I check the bedroom, but she’s not in. I return to find Tom standing pensively in the front room, staring down at one of Ossley’s printed bongs sitting on the table, next to a bag of bud, which explains the cannabis scent in the air. Thoughtfully, Tom confiscates both.
“I don’t think we want the police finding this,” he says.
“Check.”
He looks at me. “If you’ve got anything in your place, you’d better make it disappear.”
“I’m clean,” I say. “I never travel with anything that could get me busted.”
That’s what the crew is for, for heaven’s sake.
“I’m going to have to call people,” Tom says. “You should go back to your cabana. And expect the police.”
“Bruce says he has a lawyer on the way.”
“Police will probably get here first.” He frowns at me. “Do you have any idea who’d want to kill Loni?”
“No. No one at all.”
“You and she were, you know, seeing each other,” he says. “She didn’t mention anyone?”
By now the shock is over and I’m getting pissed off. “She did not tell me she was being stalked by a killer, no,” I say. “Oddly, that did not come up.”
He’s a little surprised by my vehemence.
“Okay,” he says. “I believe you. But maybe you should go to your room now.”
Which I do. But not before a sense begins to come over me that I’ve been through all this before.
The fact is that people around me keep getting killed. I don’t have ill intentions to anyone; it just seems to work out that they die. When I look into my past, I see a lot of blood there.
I’ve only killed one person myself. Well, two. But nobody knows about one of them. And I had no animosity in either case.