Bloody River Blues

very buttoned-up guy. I can’t imagine he made a mistakelike that.” Sloan was strangely pensive. His eyes did not flit around the camper. They were sedate. They were almost sad.
    The director inhaled the whiskey fumes and drank down half the glass. “Okay, John, no bullshit. Just tell me. Did you see that guy?”
    Pellam thought he meant the cop who arrested him. “I told you, I got there late. I—”
    “The man in the Lincoln is what I’m talking about.”
    “Is that why you’re here?” Pellam laughed. “You’ve been talking to . . . who? The detectives in Maddox.” No, of course not, he thought. “Peterson. You’ve been talking to Peterson.”
    “John, they can close down production for three days. If that happens the studio or Completion Bond’s going to take over. This movie might not get done.”
    “If I’d seen him I would’ve told somebody. I would’ve told everybody . Look, Tony, this’s extortion. On Tuesday Peterson’ll say, sorry, we made a mistake. Call the studio’s legal department. Call Hank.”
    “John, what’s this about the money?”
    “Money?”
    “I hear you’re trying to put something together with Marty Weller, you’re looking for some bucks.”
    “I am. That has nothing to do with you or anybody else here.”
    “Somebody paying you so you won’t testify, John?”
    Pellam lowered his head slightly and eased a long breath of whiskey-scented air into his lungs. “I think maybe you and I don’t have much more to talk about.”
    “No.” Sloan leaned forward, pointing a nubby finger at Pellam. “We got one thing more to talk about. You tell Peterson that it was this Peter Crimmins inthe Lincoln. I don’t care whether you saw him or not. I know he was in the car and I don’t even know who the fuck he is!”
    “Sorry, Tony.”
    “How much is he paying you?”
    “I’ll ask you to leave now.”
    “You want to stay on this job and get your fee, you’ll tell Peterson what he wants to know.”
    “That’s money you owe me.”
    “If I can’t wrap this picture in three days there won’t be any money for anybody.”
    “That’s not my fault. I did my job. Sell one of your Ferraris and pay me.”
    Sloan set the glass down on the camper’s tiny counter. He seemed calm but the tendons in his neck were bulging and pronounced just beneath his dark beard. His teeth were set. “Oh, I got your number, Pellam,” he said viciously. “I asked around about you. You and your artsy films, you and your Cahier du Cinéma, you and your buddies sitting around and talking about Cannes and auteur theory. You make your jokes, you make the crew giggle. Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch. But just tell me, Pellam, how many of those crew people are you paying? How many of their kids are you putting through college? How many people came to see your films, and how many come to see mine? ”
    Pellam’s last film as director, Central Standard Time, was never finished. It would have starred Tommy Bernstein, who died of a massive, cocaine-induced heart attack on the set during the second week of principal photography. The film Pellam had directed just prior to that had won a Palme d’Or atCannes but was seen by North Americans only in New York, Montreal, Toronto, Los Angeles, and in those cities with video stores that indulged in cult films. What Tony Sloan was saying now was absolutely correct.
    Pellam said evenly, “I won’t tell Peterson I saw who was in the car.”
    “Then you’re fired. Clear out. Get the paperwork and any equipment of the company’s to Stile. He’s taking over as location manager.”
    “I’ll sue you, Tony. I don’t want to but I will.”
    “If this film doesn’t wrap, Pellam, I’m coming after you for my fee. That’s a million seven. And even if I lose you’ll piss away a half million in lawyers’ fees alone. You don’t respect who I am, Pellam, okay, but you got no right to cut my legs out from underneath me.”
    “DID YOU KNOW this?” Ralph Bales asked.
    Stevie Flom looked at the offered page of the Maddox Reporter and could not figure out what he was supposed to know. “I read the Post-Dispatch mostly.”
    “Okay, it was in the Post-Dispatch, too, I’ll bet. See, it’s the Associated Press. That means a lot of papers get it.”
    They were on the riverfront in St. Louis, the silvery arch towering over them and looking lofty and weird at the same time, like a huge toy. In front of them, unhealthy-looking water, bilish and milky,