77th Street Requiem Page 3

  “Maybe it’s a good thing.” I began picking up dishes. “Even kindergarten teachers know to separate the troublemakers.”

  Michael stacked his father’s cereal bowl on his own in the sink. “Maggie, sorry I can’t wail till Casey gets up. Do you want me to take her bags out to the car?”

  “That would be a help,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Gotta go.” He leaned over his dad and gave him a quick, manly hug. Then he reached his hand to Doug. “Nice to see you. Good story.”

  “Will you be home for dinner?” Mike asked him.

  “Probably not. But if it’s good, leave me something.”

  Mike caught my hand as I set off to follow Michael out. “What time is Casey’s flight?”

  “Eight.”

  “Do you want to meet us downtown after? Doug and I are going over the funeral plans with the brass. Maybe we can break for lunch.”

  “Sorry, I can’t today.” I kissed the top of his head. “I have a meeting with the senior producer and some New York types. And we’re filming the Frady murder house today.”

  “Guido can take care of the filming stuff.”

  “He can. The network moved up my deadline—they want to broadcast the Frady film during February ratings sweeps—so I have to crack the whip a little. And there’s an interview I’m trying to get.” I glanced at Doug. “Hector found Barry Ridgeway for me. Ridgeway doesn’t want to talk, but I’m going to work on him.”

  Doug thought over that bit of news about his old Seventy-seventh Street colleague, one of the original suspects in Frady’s death, and didn’t seem very happy about it. “I thought Ridgeway was in the slam.”

  “He’s been out for years,” I said. “He served eight years for vehicular manslaughter, driving under the influence, went back in for six months on a parole violation, caught with an open container. When he got out, he went through rehab, and word is, he’s clean.”

  Doug shook his head. “He left the department on a bad-checks charge, big-time gambling debts. Word on the street is he’s done some mob hits to pay off his debts.”

  “There’s no mob in L.A.,” said Mike, the authoritarian.

  “Vegas mob,” Doug added.

  “Could be.” Mike thought it over, watching me put breakfast things away. He narrowed his eyes, something he does when he’s going to offer a gem of criticism. “You’re going to talk to Ridgeway dressed like that?”

  I wore my usual jeans and an oxford cloth shirt, generic work clothes; add a blazer, I can do lunch.

  “He won’t talk to you,” Mike said. “Not dressed like that.”

  “Why not?”

  Doug chuckled, watched Mike with great expectation.

  “You know the story about the farmer and the mule?” Mike said. “Farmer says he never has to beat his mule to make it go when it balks, all he has to do is get its attention and ask politely and the mule goes every time. But now and then he has to whack the mule over the head with a two-by-four to get its attention.”

  “And?” I said.

  “An old cop is a lot like an old mule. Sometimes you gotta hit him over the head to get his attention. And, honey, those jeans won’t do the job.”

  “What do you suggest, Mike?”

  “A skirt. Short enough so he knows you have legs, but not so short I have to go down there and kill him for looking.”

  “You want me to hit him over the head with some leg?”

  “You want him to talk to you? Trust me, a short skirt works better with an old cowboy like Ridgeway than a good vocabulary and serious intent.”

  He got up from the table and began to fill the dishwasher. He talked with Doug about work, a case entering the trial phase and another evolving—an ugly torture murder involving six teenage suspects. Doug said something about hiring a bagpiper to play at Hector’s funeral. I reminded Mike he had promised to come along on an interview that night.

  When I saw them off, Mike seemed all right, except that his suit pants irritated the rash he had got rolling around in the grass at the park. At least I knew he would be thinking about me all day.

  The last thing Mike said was, “Give Casey a kiss for me.”

  All morning I felt a low buzz in my head; not enough sleep the night before, too much real world filling the day ahead. Every time I stopped moving, the same thought pushed to the surface, the same thought that kept pulling Mike down: Hector is dead.

  I made some calls to my production staff before I went up and changed into a suit with a short skirt, and went in to waken my daughter. My day’s schedule was full of freeway time, beginning with a trip to the L.A. airport that I did not want to make, segueing into a meeting, then trying to collar Ridgeway, and a full day shooting the house where Roy Frady’s body was found, followed by an interview down in the southern suburbs. It was good to stay busy, but I was in no hurry to get started.

  Savoring the last quiet moment, I stood at the foot of Casey’s bed and watched her sleep, feeling sad that I might never be able to watch her this way again. The dog, Bowser, disengaged himself from his nest behind her skinny legs and low-crawled over for a head scratch. He seemed wistful, as he always did when there were packed suitcases going out the door.

  Because there was no way of avoiding the inevitable, I shook Casey’s foot and started to sing “Hit the Road, Jack.”

  “Please, Mom.” She looked up at me through her mass of brown hair, her gray eyes narrowed and sleepy. “Don’t sing.”

  “It’s six-thirty. Your flight leaves at eight. If I don’t see your sweet face downstairs in fifteen minutes, I am coming back and I will be in full voice—three verses, a cappella and off-key.”

  I turned and left the room, heard her stretch and yawn as she got out of bed, heard her shuffle around packing last-minute things into her carry-on. I kept walking, down the hall, down the stairs, when what I really wanted to do was take her on my lap and hold her one last time before she left. The lap scene was difficult to visualize: At sixteen, Casey was six feet tall. In my mind she was still, and always, a babe in arms.

  I set out juice and a bagel for Casey to grab on her way through the kitchen, and then went out to make sure that Michael hadn’t missed any of her bags. He was long gone—he ran in the hills before his early classes at Occidental College—but he had left a note for Casey on the windshield. Seeing it didn’t make me feel any happier: a picture of a baby bird in a tutu flying from the nest. Was this premature event something to celebrate?

  When Casey came out of the house she was radiant with excitement, fairly dancing as she made her way across the lawn toward the garage. She was so ready for the adventure ahead that I refused to dampen her spirits with my own qualms. In less than two hours she would be on her way to Houston for a year to study ballet at a top-notch academy. And from there?

  I had to take a few deep breaths. If all went well in Houston, at the end of the year Casey could sign with a ballet company and go on tour. Maybe she was flying from my nest forever.

  Bowser followed Casey with his tail between his legs. Before she was even in the car, he set up a howl.

  “What a spoiled baby he is,” Casey said. I saw the mist in her eyes as she turned to fasten her seat belt.

  “Call me as soon as you get to Houston.” I backed into the alley and headed for the street. “You have Guido’s pager number, and Mike’s voice mail number. Remember, if you have any sort of problem, call Rollie at the network’s Houston affiliate. He owes me; he’ll leap through fire for you.”

  “Chill, Mom. Dad’s meeting me at the airport. He’ll be with me for a whole week.” She pulled down the mirror on her sun visor and began to put on her makeup—a quick brushing of blusher and mascara. “Did I tell you? Dad says that this case he’s working on keeps him in Houston so much that he’s rented an apartment. Two bedrooms. Any time he’s in town, I can stay with him if I want to.”

  “Good.” I didn’t know what else to say. For Casey, after so many years of occasional weekend visits, having
her father around might be good. I confess to having a twinge that felt like jealousy. Ever since the divorce, certainly ever since Scotty’s remarriage and his move to Denver, I hadn’t been called upon to share Casey very often. I wondered how Scotty’s wife felt about sharing him with another woman.

  “I’m going to be fine,” she said. “But what about you?”

  “I’ll miss you. From Halloween to Christmas is a long time not to see your face.”

  “Oh great.” She scooted up closer to the mirror so that she could see her face. “I knew it. Volcano zit.”

  It was a good diversion, but I caught her dab at her eyes.

  At the departure gate, I managed not to cry or otherwise humiliate my daughter when I kissed her good-bye. But when she was gone, I needed a few minutes to compose myself before I walked away. It was nearly 8:30 when I made my way back to the freeway, certain by then that at least her plane had cleared the runway.

  It was Wednesday. We had begun filming on Monday and already I had the film technicians’ union on my back (they wanted more security because of the neighborhood where we were shooting), a network accountant was demanding ass-kissing, and an interviewee was threatening to sue if I aired what she had told me, even though I had her signed release on file.

  Network protocol and all its attendant bother—union rules, Cal/OSHA, accounting, accounting, accounting—reminded me hourly why I had quit a network job years ago to go independent. And why falling back into a network contract, even if it was only for seven more months until Mike retired from the LAPD, had been such a personal capitulation.

  The very worst part of being connected to a major media empire was meetings. Staff meetings, division meetings, meetings to plan meetings, and horror of horrors, every month or two the network sent someone out from New York to check on things. Normally, Lana Howard, my senior producer, and I did the verbal equivalent of jerking them off so they would go away mollified. But I resented having to go through the motions, especially when it kept me from the work I was hired to do.

  Though I make documentary films for a living, the technical aspects of filming are not my forte. My assistant, Guido Patrini, an old pal from my days in the trenches, oversees the setup and camera work, and doesn’t suffer fools gently. I had left the chore of setting up at the day’s film site to Guido. When I called him from the car, he told me everything was under control, and that it was fine with him if I took my meeting with the New Yorkers without him.

  We gathered in Lana’s posh office with its view of Hollywood under the smog, facing off over opposite sides of the vast conference table: me and Lana against Gaylord Smith, he of the olive-drab silk suit and loafers without socks—a bad sign—and Steven Roybal, his bun boy. Their combined age was less than fifty.

  Under the gaze of New York scrutiny, I felt uncomfortable in my short-skirted suit. If I had known the nature of the meeting when Lana called, I would have skipped the stupid skirt for my usual jeans and added a field jacket as a reminder to Gaylord that my roots were in the news division and not Movie of the Week. And that I was no pushover. Gaylord wanted me to drop some dramatization into my documentary, and I had, so far, resisted.

  Lana started the meeting by dropping in a little business. I thought her timing of this small gem was meant as a message to the boys. She handed me the business card of a freelance journalist named Jack Newquist. “Rolling Stone wants to do a piece on you. This Jack wants to follow you around. He’ll meet you at the Ninetieth Street shoot. Any problem with that?”

  I said, “No,” and tucked the card into my planner. I had a feeling Rolling Stone was more interested in the Patty Hearst-Symbionese Liberation Army angle to my story than in me, but I saw the significant glance pass between Steven and Gaylord and said nothing more. In fact, the thought crossed my mind that Lana was making up the journalist to impress these men.

  She opened her agenda by saying, “Our Maggie is certainly on the ascendance. We’re making shelf space for Emmy.”

  “Love your work, Maggie,” Gaylord said, his equivalent of giving me a hand job. “At network we’re proud we brought you aboard.”

  “Nice to hear,” I said. “When network sends some big guns out, compliments are not what one expects.”

  Still grinning his smarmy grin, he edged into the reason he had made the trip. “We want to reassure you that our only purpose in being here is to get a little progress update, offer the services a big company like ours can offer. You’re not an independent on a shoestring anymore, Maggie. Take advantage of the available resources.”

  “I won’t do staged reenactments,” I said. “I don’t work with actors.”

  “Has it occurred to you that network audiences might expect more …” Gaylord looked at Steven.

  “Production value,” Steven supplied.

  Gaylord nodded. “Network audiences expect more pizzazz in programming than your PBS viewers did; they just won’t sit still as long. You can’t get around the demographics, Maggie. Black and white may say fine art to you, but to Bubba down in Dumbfuckville, whose greatest treasure is the big-screen he bought at the Wal-Mart, black and white says something’s wrong with his set.”

  “Cinema verité,” Lana said, just to let us all know she had gone to film school. “Maggie’s strong suit is giving her viewer the hard edge of reality.”

  “The hard edge of reality is my only suit,” I said, grateful for Lana’s support, but worried how far it would go once my back was turned.

  Gaylord’s smile had frozen in place. “Sometimes reality falls short of good storytelling.”

  “I have content control,” I said. “You put a long line of zeros behind the dollar sign in my contract just for the privilege of attaching the network logo to my films. Someone upstairs must have thought I knew what I was doing.”

  “Absolutely.” Gaylord fiddled with his ponytail. “Maggie, darling, we have only the highest regard for your work. But now you’re a team player. Use the talent.”

  “I have the real participants. I won’t phony up their story with actors.” I got up from the table and walked over to the wall of windows, felt the sun’s warmth through the glass. I had enough union hassle managing a production crew. Who needed actors and SAG? Don’t get me wrong, I’m union to the core. It’s just that, from a management standpoint, the union is the biggest pain going.

  Lana brought me a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and leaned against the window close beside me while I sipped it. “Trust me,” she whispered, eyes front. “Tell them what they want to hear, throw them one small bone, and they’ll go away. Save the project, Maggie. Give them color, toss in some dramatization. What will it cost you?”

  “Save the project?” I turned toward Gaylord, caught him yawning. Caught Steven measuring my legs. “This meeting is about a whole lot more than adding a little color to make Bubba happy, isn’t it?”

  Steven, whose job seemed to be taking all the scut work, looked so uncomfortable that he reminded me of the doctor who had told me that my sister would never have any more brain function than a carrot.

  After a deep, noisy breath, Steven said, “The thing is, Maggie, cop stories don’t cut it. Not since Rodney King. Read the demographics.”

  I expected Lana to jump in and explain how wrong he was, but I found her watching me, waiting for me, the same way Gaylord and Steven were. Sometimes I had to remind myself that Lana got where she was by playing the system, not bucking it.

  “We had final project approval six months ago,” I said. “We’re into primary filming and we have a slot in the schedule. Isn’t your concern a little late?”

  “We have a new head of department.”

  That was all Gaylord needed to say to make the situation perfectly clear. A new man’s job is to shake things up. And it looked as if I was marked for the tumble.

  “Fine.” I walked back over to the table and picked up my notes and production schedules and accounting sheets. “The termination clause in my contract will more than finance
the completion of the film. I’ll have my agent and my lawyer get to work on the papers.”

  I was reaching for the door when Gaylord finally gasped, “You’re walking?”

  “My schedule’s tight. I don’t have time for bullshit, not if I have to go find a new buyer.”

  Gaylord was aghast. “Lana?”

  “She means it, Gaylord. Once they’ve gone independent, you can’t tell them to clean their rooms anymore.” Lana dropped down into her chair, stretched her long legs out front, and grinned evilly at the company boy. “I think the problem here is you don’t have an idea in hell what she’s working on. Roy Frady was a cop, sure. But I wouldn’t describe Maggie’s project as a cop story. Maggie, why don’t you come back over here and pitch the story to Gaylord.”

  I let go of the doorknob. “Late in the game for a pitch, isn’t it?”

  “You can’t walk, Maggie,” she said. “Who would I do lunch with on Fridays?”

  I turned to Gaylord and waited for him to say something. It was Steven who finally spoke. “There’s a lot of chaos when a new person comes aboard. Mistakes get made. Talk to us. Are we wrong?”

  I went back across the room, stood at the head of the table, and studied Gaylord and Steven long enough to make them uncomfortable. Casey’s tuition at the ballet academy was outrageous, I tithed my salary to my sister’s nursing home, and I had recently decided it was time to sock something away in case I lived long enough to retire. Then there were my share of the rent and other incidentals like power and water and food. If I walked out on my contract, if I missed even one of my checks, my dam against debt would burst and I would be swept under. But I wasn’t planning to mention any of that.

  Lana nudged my pump with the toe of her boot. “Sing it, baby.”

  I looked at Gaylord. I looked at Steven. I had their attention, so I began.

  “Fade in, urban scene shot in high-contrast black and white.” I smiled. “It’s 1974. Even to folks in Dumbfuckville, who I believe you underestimate, 1974 was a dangerous time. Vietnam was collapsing, falling to the Communist menace Bubba was raised to fear, maybe had gone off to fight. The OPEC countries had cut off America’s supply of cheap oil, and everyone who drove a car was waiting hours in line for the privilege of being gouged for another tankful; we all had to consider giving up our beloved, muscular, American-made cars for tiny Japanese shit, and it scared us.