I don’t get up in the morning thinking, “Well, who will I kill today?” I don’t intend harm to anybody. I never have.
I’d hoped all that was behind me. But now Loni’s been murdered by an unknown party for unknown reasons, and it’s all beginning to seem horribly familiar.
By the time the police interview me, late at night, reliving my old memories has me emotionally exhausted and discouraged and depressed, and I don’t have to act at all in order to seem like Loni’s stunned, grieving boyfriend. It’s only the knowledge that if I misstep, I might be blamed for everything that keeps me from lurching in the direction of the nearest tequila bottle and drowning in it.
The police interview goes better than I expected. Turns out that the production rates the best—very quickly the local cops are supplanted by the PFM, the Policía Federal Ministerial, who are the top investigators in the country. I’m interviewed by a very polite man in a neat gray civilian suit with excellent English skills. His name is Sandovál. He offers his condolences on my loss and records the interview on a very new recorder with a transcription function, which displays a written version of the interview on a nine-inch screen. The problem is that it keeps transcribing the English words as whatever Spanish words seem phonetically close, and the result is complete gibberish. He doesn’t know how to turn on the English function, if there is one, but he assures me that the audio recording will be all right.
He sort of looks like Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil, and I have a moment of grim amusement as I remember Heston’s character trying to get his radio-bugging device working in that film.
Sandovál has two assistants, an older white-haired man, well dressed, who sits quietly and listens without speaking. He might be the senior officer, but I think he might not be talking because his English isn’t very good. And there’s another man, thick-necked and blond, in hiking boots and some kind of faded blue bush-ranger jacket with lots of pockets. He looks American, but he doesn’t talk either, so I can’t tell.
No lawyers have shown up, but Tom King sits in on the interview as moral support, and confirms my story as I tell it.
It goes well enough until I mention that after I found the body I contacted Tom. Sandovál’s eyebrows go up.
“You didn’t call the police?” he asks.
“I don’t know how to call the police in Mexico,” I said. “I don’t have the emergency number. I thought someone else might know.”
If Sandovál finds this implausible, he doesn’t say so. I finish my story, and Sandovál asks a few follow-up questions, and then he offers his sympathies again and leaves.
Speaking as someone who’s been interrogated by police any number of times, I am sure this interview is about as good as they get.
After, I have no trouble sleeping. In the morning, I’m awakened by the assistant director bringing me breakfast. This is not normally part of her job, but she’s offering condolences and also trying to find out if I’m functional and can carry on with the production.
I assure her that I’m okay. I ask her what’s going on, and she tells me the police are still around, taking measurements and interviewing everyone. The news of Loni’s death leaked, of course, and half a dozen paparazzi drones are circling the hotel, while extra police have been deployed to keep intruders off the premises.
In fact, because she speaks Spanish and overheard some of the cops yelling at one another, she knows a lot about the investigation. Apparently the local police bungled everything before the PFM got here.
“They cut out pieces of the drywall where the bullet went through,” she burbles. “Both in Loni’s apartment and in Emeline’s. They put them in evidence bags, but they forgot to label them, and now they don’t know which is which. And so many cops came into Loni’s apartment to have their pictures taken that all the evidence there, like the blood spatter, is useless …” Her eyes grow big as she realizes that Loni’s presumed lover is perhaps not the best recipient of this news. She puts her hands over her mouth.
“Oh gosh, Sean, I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said any of that!”
“They wanted their pictures taken with a corpse?” I demand. I’m sickened.
I can see the whole thing. Cops in uniforms tramping around, posing with the body, the famous scandalous Hollywood star …
Though, on second thought, maybe that’s how Loni would have wanted it.
The assistant director scurries away, but she isn’t the last person to bring me food. Apparently it’s customary to bring food to someone in mourning, even if that person doesn’t need it—after all, I’m the star of the production, and normally I get three catered meals a day, plus healthy snacks—and now my refrigerator’s filling up with fruit bowls, soups, boxes of chocolate, six-packs of yogurt, cakes, bags of nuts, and a gluten-free pizza.
Plus there are lots and lots of flowers, including a perfectly giant bouquet from my agent.
The only person who doesn’t express condolences is Mila Cortés, the beautiful Venezuelan who plays my character’s girlfriend, Anna. Mila is a complete prima donna. She’s too good for the resort hotel that’s housing everyone else on the production, and she’s staying on a yacht berthed in Playa del Carmen, north of here. I only see her when we have a scene together, and the rest of the time she ignores me.
Worse than ignores, actually. In fact she’s repulsed by my appearance and is offended to her soul that she has to share the universe with someone as strange-looking as me. I’ve been strange-looking for a long time now, and people with Mila’s attitude stand out from the others quite easily.
Still, most everyone else cares, and despite the ridiculous superabundance of flowers and food, I’m genuinely touched by everyone’s concern. They expect me to be torn with grief, and so powerful is the force of their belief that I find myself genuinely grief-stricken. Sometimes my voice chokes and dies in midsentence. Tears come to my eyes. I’m in awe of my ability to embody the character of a devastated lover.
When one of the sound techs, a really beautiful California blonde named Tracee, offers to help me forget Loni, I tell her I’m too broken up to respond. So we make an appointment for late that night.
The lawyers turn up around midmorning and I have to go through the story again, which depresses me even more.
Around noon the claustrophobia gets to me, so I decide to pay a visit to the director, Hadley. I put on a pair of shades and a stolid expression and go out into the sunlight, and suddenly the air is full of whirring as camera drones zoom in for close-ups.
Being in the tabloids always makes me feel happy and wanted, so I force myself to don the required attitude of moody bereavement and shuffle along with my hands in my pockets.
I find Hadley talking to Sandovál by the pool. Another Mexican cop is talking to Chip, the man who’s cousin to somebody on the set. There’s a line of people to be interviewed, so obviously this will go on for a while.
People keep walking up to me to offer condolences. The advantage of being out of doors is that I can escape them. I thank them and move on, as if I had somewhere to go.
I end up on the beach, alone on the brilliant white sand staring out at the water. I figure it’ll make a great picture on the cover of the Weekly Dish, or some other such publication.
The ocean is a perfect turquoise blue, with surf breaking over the reef a hundred yards offshore. There are police standing around on the beach, guarding the sand or something, but they’re polite enough not to approach.
I breathe in the iodine scent of the sea.
“Hi,” someone says. “You doin’ okay?”
I turn and see that it’s the blond cop who was present at my interview the night before, the man I thought might be American. He’s still in his blue bush jacket, and he’s wearing Ray-Bans, like Gregory Peck in that movie about some war or other. His voice is a sort of tidewater North Carolina.