Blue Movie (25 page)

But Sid was not to be put on, now that the chips (big blue) were down. “Whatever you think, Jen,” he said with apparent innocence, “I mean, you
know
how much emphasis everybody puts on
youth
these days . . . including major producers. You just hang in there.” And he gave her a serious wink and walked slowly away, leaving her to glower after him, furious in pigtails and pinafore, her expression one of contempt for all mankind.

O
NE OF THE MORE
curious aspects of C.D.’s presence was his surprising camaraderie with Lips Malone. Two people with less apparently in common would be difficult to imagine; yet they were together constantly, and it was fairly obvious—from their hushed tones and the occasional guarded exchange of confidential looks between them—that they were involved in something clandestine, or at the very least, secret from the others. Sid, especially, found it annoying; he knew that C.D. had not previously known Lips, so that whatever was happening between them could only have begun after his arrival. And Lips, of course, was scarcely more than a chauffeur, a runner, a flunky; to see him in hushed converse with the head of the world’s largest motion-picture studio was almost more than Sid could bear. “What the hell are they
talking
about?” he would demand of Morty, “I mean, Jeez, Lips Malone don’t know his ass from a hole in the ground—and there he’s yakking away to
C.D. Harrison,
for Chrissake! What the hell’s going on!?!”

Mort shrugged. “Who knows? Some kind of
procurement,
right? I mean, what else? He’s
procuring
something for the old man.”

Sid snorted. “Well, he ain’t come through with much, is he? I ain’t seen a broad
yet
with them two!”

Mort raised his brows.
“So?
Maybe the old man’s into a
new bag
. . . who knows?”

“Are you
kiddin’?
” Sid was growing irate. “That old man’s got a
cunt
for a
brain,
for Chrissake! Believe me, I know! What else could it
be,
for Chrissake?
Dope?”

But wise Mort only shrugged. “With these two? Who knows?”

Sid’s concern, aside from the purely abstract annoyance and confusion (spiced with a dash of envy) at seeing Lips and C.D. together like that, was based on the very real fear that Lips would blow the “Les in Paris” cover story.

“He’d
never
do it,” said Morty. “Lips may be a lot of things, but one thing is sure, he ain’t no
fink.
”

Sid doubted it. “Oh yeah? The money’s
right,
Lips Malone is a
fink
—believe me, I know the type.”

“I’ll tell you where you’re wrong, Sid—
principle.
With guys like Lips, it’s
principle.
I mean, I know the neighborhood he grew up in . . . well, that neighborhood, there was a lot of things he didn’t learn, but
one thing he knew:
‘If you
fink,
you’re
dead.
’”

“Okay, Mort,” Sid cautioned, his finger wagging sternly, “but you just better make sure you’re right—because if he blows the whistle on us . . . I mean, if that old man finds out we got his kid stashed in a nut house, shooting him full of dope every two hours, it’ll be
us
who’s
dead!
That’s a fucking
federal rap,
buster—
kidnapping,
they call it!”

Mort began to perceive the grotesquely serious possibilities and was quick to don his trouble-shooter’s hat. “Right, Sid,” he said tersely, “I’ll check it out.”

Meanwhile, everyone—except, perhaps, Jenny Jeans—was pleasantly surprised that C.D. had not made a thorough nuisance of himself. Instead, he had been quite content, thus far, to look at some of the “Maude, as a child” footage, making only a single comment throughout the screening, though Sid sat alongside, with a yellow-padded clipboard and ball point poised, ready to take any note or critique required. His one comment occurred during a sun-lit exterior, when Maude (Jenny) at age eight, pigtails and short, starched pinafore, in a full-figure medium-close shot, turned away from camera to lean over and pick up a kitten from the grass—a movement which filled the screen with the back of her limbs, beginning at the white ankle socks above the patent-leather Mary Jane shoes, and going up the back of calves, back of knees, back of thighs to the pert bottom—gift-wrapped, as it were, in her little-girl, plain-edged, white-cotton, Fruit-of-the-Loom panties.

“Uh, make sure she wears those same underclothes, all right, Sidney?”

“Check,”
Sid replied at once, Mr. Efficiency, reflexively snapping on the light at the top of the clipboard, then realizing it wasn’t the sort of note he need—or, in fact, should—take, so he went into a small coughing spasm instead, and switched off the light. “Take it off your mind, C.D.,” he said, jovial and brisk, trying to get back in the ball game, “I’ve got it covered.”

But C.D., as he continued staring expressionless at the same shot, just nodded and grunted.

About then Lips arrived to pick him up. Sid was surprised because he had scheduled an hour screening and it wasn’t finished. He looked at his watch—still fifteen minutes to go. “You’re a little early, Lips.”

Lips, who, after a hushed exchange with C.D., was now helping him with his coat, looked at Sid, but avoided his eyes. “No, I don’t think so, Sid. I mean, you know, not really.”

“It’ll keep, Sid,” said C.D., gripping Sid’s shoulder as they left the projection room, rather hurriedly it seemed, while yet another take of the fabulous “Maude bends over to pick up the kitten” shot filled the silver screen behind them.

But the boss surprise for Sid was yet to come—and did, indeed, at the next day’s screening, during one of the most engaging sequences of the assembled footage—or so Sid felt, being as it was the scene in which “Momma” (Louise Larkin) explains to Maude the concept of
“noblesse oblige”
as it pertains to a young lady of the South. During this scene—and Sid was pleased to observe, out of the corner of his eye, that C.D. seemed to be enjoying it—the door of the projection room again opened with a stab of light, just long enough for someone to enter. Lips Malone. He bent over C.D. and whispered—completely unintelligible, except for one word which sounded like “warm,” but Sid couldn’t be sure; in any case, C.D. responded with the serious alacrity usually reserved for rushing to a mother’s deathbed.

“I’ll see this later, Sidney, it’s beautiful,” he said hoarsely as he left, carrying his coat, and this time Lips didn’t say anything at all, or even look at Sid—just hurried after the old man, in his hand the chamois-skin bag Sid had seen before.

I
T DID NOT
take the able Mort Kanowitz long to learn the true nature of the odd friendship between Lips Malone and old C.D.—albeit more by chance than design that he did. It was on the second day of C.D.’s screening—when, as it happened, the interruption coincided with the very time Mort was required to leave the bedside of his “patient,” for a trip to the local chemist to replenish his waning supply of morphine, now being consumed in ever increasing dosages.

Having completed the transaction, he emerged from the apothecary and was alarmed to see the big studio Merk swerve past him, Lips at the wheel, driving insanely, while old C.D. crouched hawklike in the back seat, looking sinister indeed in his jet-black shades and clutching his chamois-skin bag in a taloned grasp. Mort reflexively drew back into the doorway, his first thought being that Lips had spilled, and they had followed him to the dope connection; he looked wildly about, fully expecting, also, to see some cop-type with them, or behind—and was greatly relieved when he did not, and again, when the huge car continued past the apothecary to turn the corner, one building farther along. His relief, however, gave way to surprise and curiosity when the car stopped, as he could tell by the sound, a few seconds later. With rather obtrusive stealth, he walked to the corner and peered around it. There was the great Merk, parked near the rear of the building, empty. This was the building next to the apothecary—and, from the looks of things, they had left the car, and gone in the rear entrance.
What the hell’s going on?
Mort wondered, and he stepped back to study the front of the small building, trying to determine what it was. There was something strangely familiar about it, but it escaped him for the moment. Then he did remember—this was where they had rented the hearse; it was the mortuary. This realization almost staggered him with panic; it could mean only one thing—Les Harrison had died of an overdose. Yet how was that possible? He was all right fifteen minutes earlier, and that had been when he was more than half an hour into his fix, whereas, the symptoms of M-overdose are instantaneous. He must have died from something else, Mort decided. In any case, he must find out at once. “If those guys think
I’m
taking the rap for it,” he muttered, “they’re
nuts!”
He checked his watch—he could be out of the country in twenty-five minutes.

The front of the mortuary was dark, its shades drawn, the door locked. He walked around to the side, down to the Merk, and then into the narrow alleyway where the rear entrance was located. Three wooden steps led up to a door and a window beside it; Mort cautiously ascended. The window was partially open, but its shade was drawn, and the door was shut. At the bottom of the windowshade, however, was a slit of light, and he found that by leaning down so that his eyes were on that level, he could see, quite clearly, into the room. Standing close together, in the center of the room, were three distinct figures, two of whom he recognized immediately to be Lips and C.D. The third man, he then recalled, was the man from whom they had rented the hearse, and he appeared to be counting small packets of currency as they were handed to him from Lips, while C.D., holding his chamois-skin bag in one hand, stood alongside them, trancelike, staring down at the fourth occupant of the room, lying on a narrow table—a figure which Morty had overlooked before, but which he now saw very plainly—a dark-haired woman of indeterminate age, half covered by a sheet, and quite obviously a corpse.

“Hurry it up!” he heard C.D. whisper tersely as he took off his jacket.

Lips and the mortician completed the count, and started for the door. “I’ll wait in the car,” Lips muttered.

Morty jumped off the steps, and ducked behind, on the side away from the street—so that when the two men reached the bottom of the steps, they turned in the opposite direction from where he was hiding.

He waited for a minute after they had rounded the corner, then he came out, tiptoed up the steps again, and looked in beneath the shade.

“Holy Christ”
he muttered, his mouth dropping open.

Inside the room, standing naked by the table, C.D. was in the process of strapping an odd, dildolike extension device, which appeared to be made of plastic, onto his already erect member, giving it a startling, even caricaturish length and girth. From the chamois-skin bag, which now lay open on the floor, he extracted a jar of what was, presumably, a lubricant and began applying it vigorously to the device.

Standing naked, wearing only the device and his dark glasses, he presented a bizarre spectacle indeed as he massaged lubricant onto the absurdly exaggerated phallus, with serious mien.

While Mort looked on in astonishment, he removed the sheet from the corpse with a flourish, arranged the legs, pulling up the knees to a coital position, placed himself between them, and maneuvered the device to penetration.

Morty, who had begun to feel somewhat dizzy, half turned away to descend the stairs, but stopped short at the sound of what he recognized to be C.D.’s voice. He leaned down again, peering intently, cocking his ear to one side, straining to decipher the husky tones. Then he made it out, being delivered in a theatrical stage-whisper, expressing an almost frightening urgency:
“You slut, tell me you can’t feel it! I dare you! Tell me you can’t feel it, you dirty slut!”

“N
OW THEN,”
B
ORIS WAS
explaining to Angie, “the obligation of this scene, as I see it, is to
establish beyond any doubt
exactly where Maude’s
head
is at this particular moment—that is to say, the full extent of her mania, which takes her, in fact, to the very edge of madness. Right?”

She stared at him, eyes glistening with adoration.
“You’re so wonderful,”
she said softly.

The drug she was on, as far as Tony had been able to determine, was a combination of methedrine and liquid opium, presumably tinctured with something to stabilize the mixture. In any case, its effect was that of a mammoth tranquilizer, embodying as it did both
boss-upper
and
boss-down dream.
It had arrived in her studio fanmail about a month earlier—a small carton containing twelve large capsules, each in a separate compartment. The accompanying letter read:

D
EAR
M
ISS
S
TERLING:

I am a graduate student at Berkeley, where I study Advanced Chemistry.

Needless to say, I am also a fan of yours, and the other day I read (in
Silver Screen)
that you were ‘sometimes blue.’ The next time you are, try one of the enclosed capsules.

With best wishes for your continued success,

H
OWARD
K
.
L
AWTON

The inside flap of the carton was marked:
“For Little Girl Blue.”

She had promptly put the carton aside and forgotten about it, only to come across it again when packing and hurriedly toss it in with her many other medicines. Then, on an impulse, when she was having such trouble with the first scene, she had taken one—and the rest was cinematic history, or hopefully soon to be.

Tony had learned the nature of the concoction by stealth and ruse—rooting about in her things until he found her “medicine box”—followed by a lengthy, highly impressionistic process of trial and error. He identified the meth by its effect, and the liquid O by its taste and blackness. He showed up at the set absolutely zonked. “This is it,” he said, handing Boris a sample. “I advise you to take one immediately.”