Fletch’s Moxie

21

“Well, darlings.” Edith Howell picked up her drink and stood up. “If you’re not chatting you might as well be dead, I always say. Or asleep.” Sitting out in the night, she and Sy Koller and Fletch had been silent for two minutes. “So I might as well go to bed.”

After she closed the door to the house behind her, Sy Koller lifted his drink to Fletch and said, “I like my drink, too, you see.”

“You’ve had a hard day,” Fletch said. “Attacked with a knife by one of your actors. Orally attacked by one of your colleagues.”

“Ah, the perils of being a director.” Sy Koller chuckled. “Being a director is like being the father of a large family of berserk children who keep slipping in and out of reality. We get paid for hazardous duty, but not enough.”

“I thought I should tell you,” Fletch said slowly, “that the police know that you and Peterman had a fist fight outside a Los Angeles restaurant three years ago.”

“They do? How do you know that?”

“Talked to Chief of Detectives Roz Nachman this afternoon. She called. She accused me of having hijacked all her prime suspects.”

“I’m a prime suspect?” Koller ran his palm over his stubbly chin and cheeks. “I shouldn’t be.”

“No?”

“Why should I put myself out of a job? Now that Peterman’s dead the future of Midsummer Night’s Madness is dubious.”

“You mean you won’t even finish filming it?”

“Well,” Koller snorted. “Peterman was the only one who seemed to believe in the property.”

“Didn’t you believe in it?”

“Not really. Peterman gave me the script and said he wanted it shot exactly as written.”

“You never even saw McKensie’s script?”

“No. Peterman said it was a pile of dung.”

“Do you think it would have been?”

“Probably not. But it was clear to me that McKensie had every reason in the world to sue Peterman, so how could I ask to use his script? It would confuse matters. You don’t know this business, do you?”

“No.”

“Think of having a career where you have to find a whole new job every six months.”

“Finding a job is the hardest job there is.”

“That’s the director’s life. And the actor’s life. And the set designer’s. It brings a certain element of the frantic to this business. And a great deal of hot air.”

“But don’t you get rich and famous after a while? Able to pick and choose?”

“Seldom. You make a pile of money, and you spend a pile and a half. Because you’re so frantic. You blow it on hot air, keeping up the image. The more money you make the more frantic you become, the more you blow it on hot air and the deeper into debt you go, which makes you more frantic.”

In the trees night birds were gossiping.

“Anyway, the police say you were fighting over a woman.”

“Is that what they say? I guess it’s what we said at the time.”

“That you had Peterman down on the sidewalk and were strangling him when you were pulled off.”

“Yeah,” Koller sighed. “It felt good.” Fletch said:

“She must have been one fantastical woman.”

“I wish I’d ever known a woman worth strangling someone over.” Koller lit a cigarette. “Methinks, mine host, you enquire as to why I was strangling Steve Peterman.”

“Just curious,” said Fletch. “Did he stick you with one of his telephone bills?”

Koller took a drink. “Happy to tell you. Because my strangling Steve Peterman three years ago is the best evidence I’ve got that I didn’t stab him yesterday.”

Fletch waited. The tip of Koller’s cigarette glowed brightly.

“I caught him out in a fraud,” Koller said. “I resented it. I hated it. Peterman wasn’t the first to work this scam, and he wasn’t the last. But, Fletcher, this business can be so dirty… sometimes it gets to you. What he was doing was raising money for a film which didn’t exist, and never would. He had gotten ahold of something which looked like a filmscript, a story about some South American patron and his daughter and a priest and a revolutionary—a complete mess. Anybody who knew anything about the business would know it wasn’t a filmscript. It was just a hundred pages of people saying hello and goodbye and making speeches at each other. He had been out peddling this to people who didn’t know better across this broad land—you know, the doctors and the shoemakers, the widows and the orphans, all who dream of making a financial killing on a big movie while having their lives touched with glamor. They’d be invited to the opening in New York. Also the Academy Award ceremony of course. He told the suckers he just wanted start-up money, to be paid back when and if he got the film capitalized.”

“But not to be paid back if he did not get the film capitalized?”

“Of course not. Told them it was going to be filmed in El Salvador. Even had an El Salvadorean S. A. Had no intention of trying to capitalize it. You never heard of this scam?”

“No.”

“I figure he’d raised about a half million dollars, all of which had disappeared down this El Salvadorean hole.” Koller stubbed out his cigarette. “I hated this for two reasons. It’s bad for the business. The next guy who goes out and tries to raise start-up money for a film might be honest. The more of these little cheats there are running around, the harder it is for the honest guy.” Koller drank. “The second reason, of course, was that he was using my name. He had told these people maybe he could get Sy Koller to direct. That we’d had conversations. That we were in negotiations.”

“Not true?”

“I’d never met the son of a bitch. First I’d heard about it was when Sonny Fields told me he’d heard it was going on.” Koller lit another cigarette, his lighter flaring in the dark garden. “So, one night after more to drink than was good for me, I met Peterman in a Los Angeles bar, pulled him out to the sidewalk by his coat collar, proceeded to hit him upside the head. He fell to the sidewalk. I sat on top of him and proceeded to throttle him. It felt real good. His neck was soft. No muscle at all. Wonder I didn’t kill him before nosey people interfered.”

“Why didn’t Peterman press charges?”

“Why didn’t I have him arrested for fraud?”

“I don’t know.”

“We came to an amicable settlement. Peterman said he was just using this scam to raise money for a real film, somewhere down the road. My career wasn’t looking too good. Aforementioned frantic need to gain employment. So…”

“So… ?”

“I agreed that if he ever had a real film to direct, I would direct it. We laid the fight off on a woman.”

“You blackmailed him.”

“We blackmailed each other. It’s the way much of this business works, old son.”

“And what happened to the half a million dollars?”

“It went into Peterman’s pockets. And then into his shoes and his wife’s furs.”

“So Midsummer Nights Madness came along, starring Moxie Mooney, whom Peterman by then controlled, and Gerry Littleford—”

“And Talcott Cross hires Geoffrey McKensie to direct. I called Steve Peterman.”

“Had you seen the script?”

“No. But I had a pretty good idea it wasn’t much good.”

“Why would you want to direct a loser?”

“Well. … In the three intervening years my career had sunk so low I was getting the bends. You understand?”

“How would directing a stinker help your career?”

“It would prove I could get employed. It would also provide me with some much needed money. You know about money?”

“I’m learning.”

“End of story,” said Koller. “As long as Peterman was producing, Koller was directing. Peterman dead: Koller dead. Ergo the one person absolutely guaranteed not to kill Steven Peterman is your’s truly. Maybe it’s a shameful story,” Koller concluded, “but it’s a hell of an alibi.”

“Fletch?” Moxie’s voice came from the upper balcony of the Blue House. “Are you out there?”

“Yo.” He stepped under the balcony.

She said, “If you give me any of that Romeo crap, I’ll spit on your head.”

“If only your fans could hear you now.”

“Go find Freddy for me, will you? I was sort of rough on him.”

“Yes, you were.”

“If I want criticism,” she said irritably, “I’ll ask for it.”

“You’re asking for it.”