The Last Whisper in the Dark: A Novel (11 page)

“At one time they did. We always had Christmas parties and Fourth of July cookouts. My parents loved having guests. My father did a lot of business that way.”

“I never asked. What’s he do?”

“He’s a television and movie producer. He used to take me into Manhattan to the studio offices and introduce me to celebrities. I once met … I once met—” Her memory faltered and her voice faltered too. “I met a number of celebrities, but I can’t remember any of them now.” She tried to hold back the wash of emotion, but the tears came again anyway. She flicked her wrists and tried to smear them away.

“It wasn’t your fault, Ma.”

“No, I don’t think it was. But it’s sad anyway.”

“There’s still time to change your mind.”

“No, there isn’t.”

I did a K-turn in the street and backed up the Crowe driveway. I already had a bad feeling and wanted to be able to hop behind the wheel and rip out.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Try to smile.”

“I’ll do my best.” I gave her my smile.

We got out and headed up the extravagant brick walkway. We didn’t get a chance to ring the bell before John answered the door with the adorable grin already pressed into place. When it was finally revealed I knew his scam would somehow change my life. He sang out with a loud “Hey-ey!” He grabbed my mother in a bear hug and hefted her heels off the stoop. She allowed him to dance her around for a couple seconds before he led us into the foyer.

Without letting her go he reached aside and stuck his hand out to me. We shook. He said, “You found the place okay? No problems,
right?” He said it like he didn’t know my mother had lived here until she was twenty. Maybe he didn’t. It was make talk that didn’t deserve a response, so I didn’t give one. He ushered us deeper into the Crowe house.

“Oh,” my mother said.

The inside was about as different from the exterior as you could get. It was bright and inviting and looked designed for cocktail parties and charades and celebrity mixers. Lots of homey rooms, some small but most excessively large, all packed with expensive stylish furniture. John asked if he could get us anything, a drink, tea, something harder, an early lunch.

We begged off and he led us into a living room where a man about my father’s age stood in the center of the room, arms at his sides like he was on guard duty, just waiting for my mother to walk in.

He dyed out the gray streak the same way she did. He had reddish-brown hair like her as well.

“Ellie,” he said.

“Hello, Will.”

She moved to him and gave him a brief awkward clench that soon became a genuinely emotional embrace. I was surprised, and a bit jealous, by its intensity.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said.

“And you look heal);
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font-style: italicre couple of thy. You’re trim, you’ve lost all your baby fat.”

“A long time ago. My wife Stephanie was a nutritionist. She taught Mom how to cook meals without all the fat and heavy carbs. Now we eat plenty of legumes, fruit, and nuts for good blood glycemic numbers and HDL levels.”

I had no idea what a blood glycemic number or HDL level was, or if mine were any good, but I tried my best to appear as if they were. My mother opened her hand and motioned to me. “This is my son Terry.”

Will raised his chin and went deep into my eyes. He was a man
of quick assessments, who judged others instantly on how they presented themselves, how strong their handshake was, how expensive their cologne. I was glad I was wearing Grey’s. Will gave my hand one hard squeeze and pump, then didn’t let go. “Hello, Terry, it’s nice to finally meet you. I’m sorry it’s taken so long.”

“I suppose I am too.”

I tried to say something more but there wasn’t anything more. He brought his other hand over and clasped mine in both of his. He smiled and in his smile I saw that he was at as much of a loss as I was. I broke our clutch. He had years to catch up on with his sister and nothing at all to cover with me.

My mother and her brother drew off to one corner of the room and chatted quietly about their father’s fading health. He put his arm around her shoulder and brought her in close and gave her a brisk but honest kiss on the cheek, and she fell in close to him. I wondered where my grandmother was. I wondered which bedroom my grandfather was dying in.

John said, “I’ll show you my studio.”

“Studio?”

“My cutting room. I’m a filmmaker too.”

He led me through the house. I got a sense that the place was usually filled with servants or nurses. I could feel the empty spaces where they usually clustered. John stopped off in the kitchen and drew two bottles of imported beer out of the fridge. It wasn’t even ten
A.M
. yet. He handed me one. I waved him off. I had to start worrying about killing brain cells and blood glycemic numbers and brain elasticity. We traveled through a series of corridors that made me think of the Rand house with its hidden panels and fold-up ladders. I imagined the walls snapping open to reveal secret private movie theaters and game rooms.

“You live here?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“You’re, what, thirty-five? And you still live at home?”

“I’m thirty-two. You’re not all that much younger than I am and you live at home.”

“Yeah, but I’m fucked,” I said. “Are you?”

“I suppose I am.”

His cutting room was an office with nearly every inch filled with something to do with movies. Shelves packed with DVDs, walls covered with one-sheet action movie posters, some signed. Golden age of Hollywood memorabilia. Framed photos of film noir, original film reels. Computer and stereo equipment. Boom mikes in the corner. Horror movie icon models, action figures, first-edition hardcover horror novels. I knew a lot of fences who would go in big for this sort of thing. I could rake in some dough. My instincts kicked in. I looked at the windows and checked what kind of alarm system was in place in a bikini and high heels."> l. It was out-of-date and wouldn’t be too difficult.

Except we Rands had a rule that we didn’t steal from family. I wondered if it still applied in this case. Were the Crowes my family?

John had an old-fashioned editing machine, the kind that ran actual film and clipped out frames. The floor was covered with sections of film and pieces of tape and piles of dust. The maids never got in here to clean. I imagined that they’d have strict orders to keep out.

“What kind of movies do you shoot?” I asked.

“Wistful ones,” he said. “Dreamy meditations on—” He sipped his beer. He let out an angry laugh. “—on who the Christ knows what. Artsy, surrealistic, experimental pieces of shit that pay homage to German expressionism and the French new wave. At least that’s what every talentless, pretentious fucker says. And documentaries, like I said. Everyone with a camera thinks he can make a documentary. It’s because of reality television. Reality TV lets us all think we can be stars either in front or behind the lens. All you have to do is be self-important,
belligerent, promiscuous, or willing to heave yourself off a garage or in front of a car, and you’ll be popular. You’ll go viral. You watch a lot of TV?”

“No.”

“Good, that crap will rot your brain worse than crank.” John leaned back against the wall between two posters:
The Hills Have Eyes
and
The Maltese Falcon
. He was bookended by Bogie and a bald mutant cannibal wearing a necklace of bones. John raised his bottle like he was toasting me. “My dad and granddad are both very successful producers.”

“Why don’t they live in Los Angeles?”

“Granddad was out there for a few years when he was a young man, but he hated it, so he moved back here to New York for the television market. My father has a place out there in the hills, spends a few weeks or a few months at a clip getting studio projects off the ground.”

“Must be a nice in for you.”

“No. Neither one of them ever helped me much. They mostly hate what I do.”

I thought, Here it is. Here’s the setup, here’s the scam. It’s got something to do with his old man. It always has something to do with your old man.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be. I’ve got other interests. I’m into making my documentaries. Don’t ask me what subjects. A variety of them. I have a touch of OCD, I think. I’ve never been diagnosed, clinically I mean, but my obsessions seem to get the best of me. I follow them up. I have a lot of them. But then most people do, I guess, whether they admit to them or not.”

I wasn’t going to ask him what subjects.

“I’ve shot some horror films … atmospheric ghost stories,” John said.

He seemed to be waiting for a response to that. “Okay.”

“Some of it was artsy, very Asian, very European. A way to honor the human character, show it in all its flawed beauty. Passionate, erotic, lush, vivid, striking, angry, bitter, vicious, even ugly. But real. Other stuff, not so arty. More primal, you know. Bloody, gory, hot, sweaty, scary.”

“I get you. the only one I had leftndor ”

“You probably don’t approve.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because of Collie.”

He was right. I didn’t approve. I imagined lush, vivid, angry, vicious, ugly, real, bloody, gory, sweaty horror films and thought of my brother’s butchery. I’d lived through it, I didn’t need to see it on film. I’d already seen it on TV reports, at the time and then again with the upsurge of public interest right before his execution. I wanted to warn John off. I wanted to tell him not to make a documentary about my brother, not to use his story as the basis for some knife-kill flick. I looked at the bald mutant cannibal and the bald mutant cannibal looked back at me.

“I’m thinking of doing a movie on Dale.”

That shook me. “What?” A shiver ran through me and my chest tightened and my sternum ground together like my bad ribs. “What did you just say?” The rage was on me in an instant. I covered the ground between us in one bound, gripp#x201C;Stop sa

“It’s pretty brilliant, isn’t it?” John said. “The
guy who created it, some guy around my age, his name is Simon Ketch, he’s a multimillionaire already. Can you believe it?”

“It’s fake,” I said.

“That’s what Ketch’s lawyers are always arguing, to handle any lawsuits, but who knows?”

“I do.”

I sat at John’s desk staring at his screen with my eyes starting to burn. It turned out that ROG was short for
ROGUES
, a new Web-based
COPS
-like show filmed from the point of view of petty criminals pulling minor acts of theft and vandalism. Most of the kids were boys wearing ski masks or handkerchiefs over their faces. Some street chicks showed up to watch the shenanigans and applaud the illegal efforts. It was all filmed with handheld cameras chasing after the punks while they kicked in doors, busted windows, and ran through houses sticking things like DVD players into sacks and pulling cheap jewelry out of dresser drawers. Third-rate home invasion antics. The kids laughed their asses off the whole time. It wasn’t about money, it was all about the mischief.

Except in Dale’s case. She was the face of the show. She wore heavy black and red makeup, sexified but almost clownish, with her hair styled in a wild shag almost the same as Darla’s. She was skinned into tight leather clothes I’d never seen her wear before. It was a hell of a getup, a real semislick disguise. Most people who knew her wouldn’t be able to recognize her, but she couldn’t fool me.

She introduced the segments and interviewed the punks under their street names of “Lick 87,” “Morgue Baby,” and “Godless Kid.”
She never said her name but she smiled into the lens, looking beautiful, vivid, and wild, like she was heading out to an underground club. She ran along with the cameramen like an investigative reporter. She had a quiet demeanor as if she took all of this very seriously, as if she had exclusives to breaking news that would soon be on all the network stations.

The B&Es seemed staged to me. I knew the sound of real breaking glass, but when these punks put their gloved fists through the door or kitchen windows I didn’t buy it. I watched Lick 87 especially. He had the same basic size as Tony, the kid Dale was dating.

“How do they make money on this?” I asked.

“They sell downloads for a couple bucks a pop. The Web show is popular. Anything that’s popular can turn a profit somehow.”

I nodded. “And the cops?”

“It’s pretty small fry. I doubt the cops or feds are very interested. There’s tons of this kind of shit on the Internet. They can’t catch everyone. They can hardly catch anyone. It’s all anonymous.”

I played some of the segments again. Sometimes these teen Rogues were inside a house for less than thirty seconds, doing Class-C acts of vandalism. Sometimes it was worse. They ran in an open back door, shot paintball guns at folks on a couch, kicked them around some, ripped off purses and wallets, and continued on out the front door while people yelled and children screamed. Maybe it was just stupid enough to be real, but what brand of new outlaw was this? And why would Dale be involved?

There probably wasn’t a Simon Ketch at all. More likely a group of twentysomethings hiding behind the false persona, selling button-clicks of idiocy, fronted by a league of lawyers who just wanted to tie up the courts long enough to make a ton of cash and then split for some West Indies island that had no extradition with the U.S. It was a new age of grift that I just didn’t understand.

“This kind of street crime and gags have been popular for a long time,” John said. “Backyard wrestling tapes, college girls going crazy on spring break. You remember when they’d pay homeless guys to slug it out in back alleys for ten or twenty bucks?”

“Urban legend.”

“Nah, you can bet it happened. And teens robbing houses on video has been done before. Ketch just gave it a Web address and some pretty packaging.”

That was Dale, the pretty packaging.

“How long has this been going on?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I found out about it a couple of weeks ago. It’s a pretty popular site and, well, like I said, I’m sort of obsessed with the Rands.”