Dexter's Final Cut

THIRTY-THREE

Robert’s trailer was still unlocked, and as I pushed the door open I saw that it was still dim inside, too. Once again I paused just outside and peered both ways, and once again I saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing. I stepped through the door and looked around; still nobody home. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed. I looked in all the corners and closets anyway, because thoroughness is a virtue every bit as important as neatness, and I found exactly the same amount of Nothing as I’d found earlier.

And now what? Astor was still missing, Deborah was still not speaking to me, and Jackie was still dead. The world was not at all the happy place it had seemed to be so recently, and for just a moment there no longer seemed any point to pretending. All the purpose, all the anger and resolve and need to Do Something drained out of me, and I collapsed onto the edge of the couch in Robert’s living area. It had all looked so bright and beautiful this morning, and now the world had snapped back into its true form, gray and pointless and mean-spirited, and even though that was certainly a better fit for Dismal Dexter, I didn’t like it. I wanted things back the way they were. Like a little boy trapped in a dark and dreary adventure, I wanted to go home.

But I was not a little boy, and even worse, I was home. This was it, this dismal, painful, senseless trudging through sludge. This was where I lived; back in ugly old reality again. And there was nothing I could do about it, nothing at all, except to find Astor and drag her back home and start up the same old shadow show.

Home: back to dirty socks on the floor and screeching at all hours and Rita’s endless, pointless, disjointed monologues. Rita: the one person still talking to me, and I didn’t really want to talk to her and couldn’t understand what she said. And thinking of Rita, I remembered that my phone had bleated at me while I was being grilled by Anderson. It had to be her; nobody else was left.

And so with a heavy sigh and a sense of returning to painful duty, I dragged out my phone and looked at the screen. Yup: Rita. She’d left a message, naturally-why pass up an opportunity to blather? I went to voice mail and listened.

“Dexter,” she said. “I know you must be looking for her. For Astor? Because it’s been a long time now and you didn’t- And anyway, I thought of something, and I was going to- I know you said she might come home, and I thought, that’s right, she might, but maybe not-and so anyway, I’ll just be gone for twenty minutes. Oh. And I’ll call you when I get back, in case.” I heard her take a breath, as if she was going to go on, but instead she disconnected.

I glanced at the time. The call had come in fifty-eight minutes ago. I had been to college, so I knew that fifty-eight minutes was more than twenty minutes, but she hadn’t called back.

I called her number, but it rang and rang until it went to voice mail. I disconnected. I couldn’t believe Rita had left the house, and it was even harder to believe she’d gone somewhere without her phone. But apparently she had, and I would just have to wait until she got back.

In the meantime, Astor was not in any danger; she was with Robert, and she was quite probably someplace nearby, learning makeup tips. She would not want to be found, which would make things harder, but Robert would be much easier to locate. If he wasn’t hovering nearby at the edge of the excitement, somebody would know where he was-Victor, the director, would be a great place to start.

I found Victor in his trailer, just two doors away. I could tell he was in there because as I started to walk past, Martha, the assistant director, came rushing out of the trailer as if she was pursued by killer bees. Before I could even frame a question to her, she sprinted past me, muttering, “Shit shit shit shit shit,” and then vanished around the end of Trailer Row.

I went up the steps and knocked. There was no answer, but I could hear a voice inside, raised in passionate agony, so I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

Victor sat at the table, white-knuckled hand pressing his phone against his face. A large glass of water stood in front of him. He was listening to someone on the other end, shaking his head and whining, “No. No. No, impossible, fuck, no,” and as I stood there watching he picked up the glass and drained the water.

And then he reached behind him for a large blue bottle, which I recognized as a popular brand of vodka, refilled the glass, and took another healthy drink. I didn’t think he had filled the vodka bottle with water. He looked up at me without seeing me, and suddenly exploded in rage at whomever he was talking to on the phone.

“Well, goddamn it, what would you do? We got half a pilot in the can and a dead star, and the network is all over my fucking ass to fucking do something, and I can’t do shit without her and I can’t fucking raise the fucking dead!” He listened briefly-very briefly-and then snarled into the phone, “Well, then, call me back when you do know something.” He slapped the phone to disconnect and then slammed it onto the table.

“Rewrite,” he muttered angrily. “Fucking rewrite around a dead woman … Asshole …” Victor reached for his glass of “water” again, and then appeared to notice me for the first time. “What,” he said, and he did not sound like he was going to invite me to join him for a drink.

“I’m looking for Robert.” He just stared at me. “Robert Chase?” I said helpfully.

Victor screwed his face up and turned bright red, like he was going to give me a dose of the kind of bile he had unleashed on the phone, and I was in no mood for it. So it probably wasn’t the nicest thing I could have done, but I was past caring. “He has my little girl,” I said. “She’s eleven years old.”

All the color drained out of Victor’s face. It was an amazing thing to watch; one moment he was puffed up like a big red balloon, and the next he was a greenish-white thing with cheekbones poking through sagging flesh. “Oh, Jesus fuck, I’m dead,” he whispered, and he reached for his glass with two hands, lifting it numbly to his face and draining it.

When the glass was empty, Victor put it back down on the table. His hands were shaking and the glass rattled briefly before settling to a stop in front of him. He stared at the glass and then, finally, looked up at me with eyes that were nearly as dead as Jackie’s. “They said it was just gossip,” he said, and there was a slight slur to his words. “I never … I mean, you know. Richard Gere and the hamster. Tom Cruise is gay. All that shit. Just backstabbing bullshit Hollywood gossip.” He lifted the glass, saw it was empty, and put it back down again. “I swear, I never thought … I didn’t really think …”

Victor closed his eyes and slumped forward until his face was almost touching the tabletop. “Fuck,” he said. “Why me? Why is it always me …?” He began to shake his head, slowly and rhythmically. “I’m dead. It’s all turned to shit on me and I am soooo … fucking … dead.…” And he stopped shaking his head, and stopped breathing, and just sat there slumped into a pale green heap.

I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but his face had actually turned even greener, and he sat there for a long moment, motionless. Then he jerked upright, snapped his eyes open, and took a deep breath.

“You got to understand, Chase wasn’t my idea,” he said. “I wanted somebody younger, but the network needs a star. They got a list; it tells everybody’s TVQ-”

“Their what?” I said.

He gave me an impatient, irritated look. “TVQ. How popular they are. How many viewers they can get to watch something.” He held up a hand, then let it flop back down helplessly. “Robert’s is very high.”

“Right,” I said. “He’s popular.”

Victor nodded. “He’s popular. A star. And people always make up awful shit about stars. It’s … Everybody says stuff like that, you know, about anybody who makes it. It’s a mean, bitchy business, but if I thought it was really true about Chase and little girls-”

He stopped and looked down at the table again. “Fuck,” he said. “I woulda cast him anyway. He’s got a really high TVQ.” He stared at his hands for a moment, and then lurched sideways and grabbed the big blue vodka bottle and began to pour his glass full again.

I watched him, and I felt small and icy fingers tickling at the back of my neck. “What did you mean,” I said, “about Chase and little girls?”

He wouldn’t look at me. “It’s just a rumor,” he said, and he didn’t sound like he even convinced himself. He put the cap back on the vodka, and as he bent to put the bottle back on the floor I sat next to him and picked up his full glass. “What the fuck,” he said, and I slowly and carefully poured the entire glassful onto his lap.

Victor didn’t try to stop me. He just stared at the puddle of booze as it soaked into his slacks, his mouth hanging slightly open, and then he looked up at me, and I smiled. “And what is the rumor, Victor?” I said. “About Robert Chase and little girls?”

He looked at me and his Adam’s apple slid up and down, and then he finally closed his mouth and looked down again. “He likes them,” he said in a soft and husky voice. “Really likes them.” He glanced up at me briefly, then swallowed again. “He likes little girls.”

I slid closer to him and put an arm around his shoulders, feeling him tense up as I touched him. “And when you use that word ‘like,’ ” I said, “what does it really mean to you, Victor?”

“He has sex with them,” he said in a whisper. “Robert Chase is a pedophile.”

I thought about my days with Robert, and his wistful talk of kids. I thought it unconvincing and it was-but not because he didn’t like kids; it was because he really liked them. And the family portrait he left hidden on my desk. His immediate and complete interest in Astor when they met, and the way he instantly got her alone in the makeup room-and even Robert’s weekend in Mexico at a “special private resort,” which probably meant a place that catered to men with his tastes; it all added up, fit together so perfectly that in retrospect, only an idiot could have missed all the obvious clues. And I was an idiot. A true and total dolt. I had thought he was gay, and because I am a fatuous conceited idiotic dolt I had even thought he had a crush on me. And all along, it had been the kids after all.

There was no longer any doubt about it. Wave after wave of contempt for my complete stupidity washed over me, and I sat there for a very long time, just letting the waves lift me up and crash me down on the rocky shore again.

Of course Robert liked little girls, girls just like Astor. And being the Child of Darkness that she was, of course Astor would have played along, loving the sense of power and control as a full-grown man, a Star, focused all that flattering attention on her. That Saturday at Wardrobe, moments after they met, she had rushed off with him right away, down the hall to the little dressing room.…

And once more a quick movie clip flashed by on the screen in Dexter’s skull: Kathy going into that room where Astor and Robert had disappeared, and then flying out as if she’d seen a ghost, and vanishing out the door. She had seen them engaged in Inappropriate Behavior-and she had not said anything? Because Robert begged and pleaded for a chance to explain? Yes: Even with Kathy, his star power had counted for something. So she agreed to meet him that night, maybe even planning to blackmail him, and he killed her instead and took her phone so no one would know about their date. He’d even thrown up, which fit what I knew about him so well that the moment Vince told me about it I should have thought of him, and once again I let the tide of recrimination lift me and slam me into the seawall a few times. Even then I should have seen it, and if I had, my new and beautiful life would still be on track and Jackie would still be alive. Stupid, stupid, stupid Dexter.

I sat and ground my teeth and cursed myself until eventually I became aware of a very annoying sound somewhere nearby. I turned to see that I still had an arm around Victor’s shoulders, and he was clearing his throat to get my attention as he tried feebly to wriggle free.

“Hey,” he said. “Listen, I really didn’t, you know, just … Are you going to …?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” I said, and I looked at him. He flinched away, and I realized from the sound of my voice and the chilled feeling of my face that Victor was seeing the Real Dexter, seeing him the way very few have seen him and lived. “Where did they go?” I said.

He quivered at the sound of my voice, but he just shook his head. “Don’t know,” he said. “Chase was here this morning and then- Shit, I really don’t know; please, you’re hurting me.”

I looked at him just a moment longer. He was much too scared, drunk, and deflated to lie, so I let go of him and stood up.

“Fuck,” Victor said, rubbing his shoulders, “scared the shit outta me.”

I glanced back at him from the door of the trailer. “Fuck,” he said again, and as I turned away he was picking up his glass.

I went out of Victor’s trailer and left the magical world of show business behind me forever. No more lights, cameras, and squibs, and finding my mark. No more adoring crowds and sunset mojitos and chauffeured Town Cars. Farewell to the grips and gaffers and extras. And adios to hiring pedophiles because they’re popular, and pretending that anything is okay if it helps the ratings and you don’t actually see anything wrong.

And good-bye forever to the new me in a flimsy gaudy setting that was all bright colors and happy lies on the surface, and nothing but sickness and death underneath where it counts, just like everything else in this vile rotten world. There would be no escape for me, no hope of happiness, no new career.

Dexter’s Debut had been derailed.

I headed for my car. I wasn’t sure yet where I was going, but at least it would be away from this.