Lullaby Town

CHAPTER THREE

The black secretary stuck his head in the door and told Peter that someone named Langston needed to see him on the stage right away.

We trooped down out of his office and back into the real world of aliens and oil barons and people who looked suspiciously like studio executives. Patricia Kyle and Peter Alan Nelsen and I walked together, with Dani sort of drifting behind. Somewhere between Peter's office and the soundstage, Nick and T.J. reappeared, Nick giving me tough whenever I looked at him. Had me shaking, that guy. Make you turn in your license, a guy like that. I looked at Peter Alan Nelsen, instead. "What was your ex-wife's name?"

"Karen Nelsen."

"Not her married name. What was her maiden name?"

"Karen Shipley. That cop we talked to, Ito, he said you're big with the martial arts. He said you took out some killer from Japan."

I said, "What's your son's name?"

"Toby Samuel Nelsen. I got the Sam from Sam Fuller. Great director. You ever been shot?"

"I caught some frag once."

"What did it feel like?"

"Peter, let's stick to the information about your ex-wife, okay?"

"Yeah, sure. What do you want to know?"

We walked along the little studio back streets and people stopped what they were doing and looked at him. They saw celebrities every day, so they wouldn't look at Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford or Jane Fonda, but they looked at Peter Alan Nelsen, and Peter seemed to enjoy it. He stood tall and when he spoke he made broad, exaggerated gestures as if what was happening had been scripted and he was acting the scene and the lookers were his audience. Maybe the lookers thought so, too. Maybe, since Peter was the King of Adventure, they figured that a Stearman biplane would suddenly appear and begin a strafing run. Maybe they thought a Lamborghini Countach driven by Daryl Hannah would suddenly screech around the corner, chased by psychopaths in souped-up Fords, and Peter would have to save the day and it would really be something to see. If Daryl Hannah was driving the Countach, Peter would have to move pretty fast. I was planning to get there first.

I said, "Okay. Do you have any idea where Karen might be living?"

"No."

"You think she's still here in Los Angeles?"

"I don't know."

"Did she ever talk about someplace in particular, like, 'I'd really like to live in Palmdale one day,' or, 'Los Angeles is the greatest city in the world. I'll never leave it,' something like that?"

"I never thought about living anyplace else."

"Not you. Her."

"I don't know."

"Did she have any friends?"

He pressed his lips together and made a shrug. "Yeah. I guess so." Thinking harder. Then, "I dunno. I was sort of into my own thing." Embarrassed that he didn't have an answer.

I looked at Pat Kyle.

Pat said, "Where was she born, Peter?"

"Someplace in Arizona or New Mexico. Phoenix, maybe." He frowned. "We never talked about stuff like that."

"Okay."

"Why don't you ask me something I know?"

"Okay. What do you know?"

He thought for a while. "About Karen?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know."

I said, "How did you meet? Did she belong to any clubs or organizations? Did she have brothers or sisters or aunts or uncles or cousins or grandparents?" I figured if I listed enough stuff I would get lucky somewhere.

He said, "I've got an older sister. She's married to a fat guy lives in Cleveland." Everything was I.

"Great. But that's about you. What about Karen?"

"Oh." Oh. Then, "I think she was an only child. I think her people were dead."

"But you don't know."

"They were dead." We walked along a little more, thinking about it. He said, "Maybe she was from Colorado."

We went through a pair of twenty-six-foot doors and into a battleship-gray soundstage that was being rebuilt to resemble the interior of a Mayan ziggurat. The doors were open to let in the air and the light. Above and around us dozens of men and women in shorts and T-shirts clung like spiders to scaffolding as they attached vacu-formed plastic panels to a wooden frame. The panels had been cast to look like great stone blocks. There were the sounds of hammers and saws and screwguns and the smell of plastic cement and paint, and somewhere a woman laughed. It was warming as the day wore on, and some of the men had their shirts off.

A heavy man with a Vandyke beard and a roll of architectural plans noticed Peter and started toward us. Peter frowned and said, "Nick, T.J., gimme some space here, huh?"

Nick gestured toward the beard and T.J. went over and intercepted him. Blocking backs.

We turned left past a couple of guys building something that looked like a sacrificial altar and squeezed between two backdrop flats and over a tangle of electrical cables into a little clearing that had been set up as a sort of office with a desk and a phone and a coffee machine. There was another Webcor candy machine next to the desk. Peter slammed it with his elbow and a PayDay candy bar dropped out. Dani said, "Peter has a candy machine like this on all of his sets. It's part of his contract." She said it like a press release.

Peter said, "Go find Langston, willya, Dani? Tell'm we're hiding back here and ready to rock."

Dani squeezed back between the flats and disappeared into the darkness. Nick hung back behind the flats, still not liking me.

Peter said, "Man, I can't take a shit, the pogues aren't after me about something. That's why we gotta hide." He tore the wrapper off the candy, stuffed most of the bar into his mouth, and dropped the wrapper onto the floor. I wondered how often he brushed.

I said, "Tell me how you met."

"I was at USC when I met her. I was casting a film and put up flyers for actors and Karen called for a reading. It was a ripoff of those biker flicks in the sixties. Eighteen minutes, synced sound, black and white. You wanna see it?"

"Is Karen in it?"

"No. I didn't give her the part."

"Then I don't need to see it."

"I made an audition tape for her. I couldn't find it, but I got the outtake tape. It was a long time ago, so it's Beta format, but I brought it into the office. We can probably dig out a machine if you wanna see. I did a pretty good job with her." More of the I's. I met. I married. I lived. Maybe Karen Shipley wasn't real. Maybe, like Pinocchio, she was a wooden puppet he had brought to life.

"What's an audition tape?"

Pat said, "It's a way for an actor to introduce herself to casting agents. The actor tells you about herself and maybe reads a scene. Peter would've shot a lot more tape than Karen would need, then edited it down to three or four minutes. The outtake tape will be the takes they didn't use in the final product."

Peter nodded and said something, but his mouth was full of candy again, and I didn't understand what he said.

I said, "I'll want to look at it. Do you have a still picture?"

He swallowed the wad of chocolate and peanuts and shook his head.

Pat Kyle opened her briefcase and handed me a black-and-white 8 X 10 head shot of a pretty young woman with dark hair and eyes that would be either green or hazel. "I phoned a friend at SAG and he came up with this." The woman in the photograph was made up as a waitress with a fluffy apron and cap and a bright the-lemon-pie-is-very-nice-today! smile. She didn't look convincing. KAREN SHIPLEY was spelled out in block letters along a white border at the bottom of the picture.

I said, "Pretty. Your friend at SAG say if Karen had an agent?"

Pat opened her briefcase again and took out an envelope large enough for the 8 X 10. "A guy named Oscar Curtiss, with two esses. He's got an office over here, just off Las Palmas. His address is in the envelope."

Peter came around next to me and looked at the 8 X 10. "Jesus, I remember this." He gestured at Karen's face. "Nothing unique about the quality. See the nose, it's a little too ordinary. See the mouth, maybe it needs to be fuller." Peter the director. "She had these made before we met. I said Christ, what do you want to look like a dopey waitress for? She said she thought it was cute. I said what a fucking waste." He stared at the picture a little more, then looked at Pat Kyle. "Can you get me one of these?"

Pat said, "Sure."

Peter looked back at the picture, and maybe there was something soft in his face, something less antic and less onstage. "She got pregnant right away and then there was the kid and I just wasn't into the family scene. I was scrambling from job to job, trying to get a toehold, and she's talking about Huggies. I busted out of film school. It was crazy. So I said, look, this isn't my thing, I don't wanna be married anymore, and she didn't fight it. I don't think I've seen her or the boy since the day we signed the papers. A little while after that Chainsaw came along and things happened fast." He spread the big hands, looking for a way to say it. "I got larger."

I said, "Did Karen work, or was she just a wannabe?"

Pat said, "Quite a bit of extra work and a couple of walk-ons. The sort of thing you get when all they need is a pretty face in the background."

"Where do they send the residuals?"

"She's got four hundred sixty-eight dollars and seventy-two cents waiting for her for some work she did on Adam 12. Neither SAG nor the Extras Guild knows where to send it."

Peter brightened and went back to the candy machine. He slammed it with his elbow and pulled out an Almond Joy. Another wrapper on the floor. "I remember that gig. I went to the set with her and tried to talk the producer into giving me an episode to direct. The guy gives me the bum's rush. That TV prick. A lousy episodic producer and he's telling me I can't hack an Adam 12, he's saying that what they do is 'highly stylized.' Man, I ain't thought about that prick in years." It was as if relating something of his to something of hers, he could remember it.

Dani came back between the flats with a fat guy in an argyle sweater. Peter said, "That's Langston. He's my cameraman. I gotta talk to him about a shot move we're designing through the pyramid set. Is there anything else you wanna know about me?"

"Karen. We were talking about Karen."

He looked annoyed. 'That's what I meant. Look, I gotta go. If you want anything, it's yours. Use my name. This town, it's like saying open sesame."

"Ali Baba."

He smiled. "Yeah. Just like Ali Baba."

He walked over to Langston.

Pat said, "Well?"

I shook my head. "He knows about him, but he doesn't know about her. How long were they married?"

"Fourteen months."

I shook my head some more. You do that a lot in this business.

Pat and I went past the electrical cables and between the flats and toward the big doors. We were most of the way there when Peter Alan Nelsen yelled, "Hey, Cole."

I turned around. Peter was up on one of the framing catwalks, grinning at me. Dani was with him and the fat guy Langston, and a couple of other people who probably had to do with the construction rather than the design. He said, "I'm glad you're on this for me. I like your style." He tossed down a Mars bar. Maybe there was another candy machine up on the ceiling. "Me and you," he said, "I think we're two of a kind. You're my kind of guy."

I thought about ripping off the candy wrapper and dropping it on the ground, but decided that that would be small. I bit through the paper instead.

Peter smiled wider and said, "Man, you are wild."

Pat Kyle shook her head.

We walked out through the big doors and into the light. The paper tasted terrible. If Daryl Hannah was watching, I hope she was impressed.