Prayers For Rain

6

The inside of Pickup on South Street, David Wetterau’s fledgling film equipment supply company, was a warehouse littered with 16-millimeter cameras, 35-millimeter cameras, lenses, lights, light filters, tripods, dollies, and dolly tracks. Small tables were bolted to the floor and spaced out twenty feet apart along the east wall, where young guys worked on checking in equipment, while along the west wall, a young guy and a young woman rolled a mammoth, crane-shaped dolly along tracks, the woman sitting up top, working a wheel that rose from the center like one you’d find in a truck driver’s cab.

The employees or student interns, both male and female, were a collection of baggy shorts, wrinkled T-shirts, canvas sneakers or battered Doc Martens with no socks, and at least one earring each glinting from heads that were either submerged under mountains of hair or had none at all. I liked them right off, probably because they reminded me of the kids I’d hung out with in college. Low-key dudes and dudettes with the fever of artistic ambition in their pupils, motor mouths when they got drunk, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s best used-record stores, used-book stores, used-clothing stores-just about any purveyor of secondhand goods.

Pickup on South Street had been founded by David Wetterau and Ray Dupuis. Ray Dupuis was one of the guys with shaved heads, and the only thing that separated him from the others was that he seemed a few years older and his wrinkled T-shirt was silk. He propped his Chuck Taylors up on a scarred desk that had been hastily placed in the middle of all the chaos, leaned back in a ratty leather office chair, and spread his arms at the lunacy around him.

“My kingdom.” He gave me a wry smile.

“Lotta work?”

He fingered the fleshy, dark pockets under his eyes. “Uh, yeah.”

Two guys came bounding through the warehouse. They ran side by side, pacing themselves, even though they seemed to be running at top speed. The one on the left had what looked like a combination of a camera and metal detector strapped to his chest and a heavy belt around his waist with bulging pockets that reminded me of a soldier’s ammo and supply belt.

“Get a little ahead of me, a little ahead of me,” the cameraman said.

The kid on the outside did.

“Now! Stop and turn! Stop and turn!”

The other kid put the brakes on, then spun and started running back the other way, and the cameraman whipped in place and tracked him.

Then he stopped. He threw up his hands and screamed, “Aaron! You call that racking?”

A collection of rags with a spillage of dark hair and a dripping Fu Manchu looked up from a boxy remote in his hands. “I’m racking, Eric. I’m racking. It’s the lights, dude.”

“Bullshit!” Eric screamed. “The lights are fine.”

Ray Dupuis smiled and turned his head away from Eric, who looked like his head was about to explode with rage.

“Steadicam guys,” Dupuis said. “They’re like kickers in the NFL. Very specialized talent, very sensitive personalities.”

“That thing strapped to his chest is a Steadicam?” I said.

He nodded.

“I always thought it was on wheels.”

“Nope.”

“So the opening shot of Full Metal Jacket,” I said, “that’s one guy moving around those barracks with a camera strapped to his chest?”

“Sure. Same with that shot in GoodFellas. You think they could have rolled a machine down those steps?”

“I never thought of it that way.”

He nodded at the kid holding the boxy remote. “And that’s the focus puller over there. He’s trying to rack focus by remote.”

I looked back at the young guys as they prepped to try the shot again, fine-tune whatever needed fine-tuning.

I couldn’t think of anything else to say but, “Cool.”

“So you’re a cinephile, Mr. Kenzie?”

I nodded. “Mostly the older ones, to be honest.”

He raised his eyebrows. “So you know where our name comes from?”

“Of course,” I said. “Sam Fuller, 1953. Awful movie, great title.”

He smiled. “That’s just what David said.” He pointed at Eric as Eric rushed by again. “That’s what David was supposed to pick up the day he was hurt.”

“The Steadicam?”

He nodded. “That’s why I don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“The accident. He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“On the corner of Congress and Purchase?”

“Yeah.”

“Where was he supposed to be?”

“ Natick.”

“ Natick,” I said. “Birthplace of Doug Flutie and girls with big hair?”

He nodded. “And the Natick Mall, of course.”

“Of course. But Natick ’s about twenty miles away.”

“Yup. And that’s where the Steadicam was.” He gestured with his head at it. “That piece of equipment makes most of the stuff we have here-all of which costs a goddamn fortune-look cheap. The guy in Natick was fire-saling it. Rock bottom. David raced out of here. But he never arrived. Next thing, he’s back downtown on that corner.” He pointed out the window in the direction of the financial district a few blocks north.

“You tell the police this?”

He nodded. “They got back to me a few days later, said they had absolutely no doubt it was an accident. I spoke at length to a detective, and I came away pretty convinced they were right. David tripped in broad daylight in front of something like forty witnesses. So I guess I don’t question that what happened to him was an accident, I’d just like to know what the hell made him turn back from Natick before he arrived and come back into the city. I told the detective this, and he said his job was to determine whether it was an accident, and on that score, he was satisfied. Everything else was ‘irrelevant.’ His word.”

“You?”

He rubbed his smooth head. “David wasn’t irrelevant. David was just a terrific guy. I’m not saying he was perfect. He had flaws, okay, but-”

“Such as?”

“Well, he had no head for the nuts-and-bolts of hard business, and he was a pretty serious flirt when Karen wasn’t around.”

“Did he fool around on her?” I asked.

“No.” He shook his head emphatically. “No, it was more like he enjoyed knowing he still had it. He liked the attention of pretty women, knowing they dug his action. Yeah, it was childish, and down the road maybe all that playing with fire would have gotten him burned, but he truly loved Karen, and he was determined to stay faithful to her.”

“With his body, if not his mind,” I said.

“Exactly.” He smiled, then sighed. “Look, I bankrolled this company with Daddy’s money, okay? I signed off on the loans. Without my name, no way it would have got off the ground. And I have a passion for it, and I’m not dumb, but David, he had talent. He was the face of this company, and the soul. People did business with us because David went out and made the contacts. David reached out to the independent film companies, the industrials, the commercials guys. It was David who convinced Warner Brothers that they should get their Panther dolly through us when they were shooting that Costner movie here last year, and once they liked the dolly they came back to us for replacement thirty-fives, replacement lights, filters, booms.” He chuckled. “You name it, they were always breaking something. Then they began to transfer their raw stock on our Rank when theirs went down, and cut their second-unit stuff on our Avids. And it was David who pulled that money in. Not me. David had charm and pizzazz, but more than that, you believed him. His word was his bond, and he never fucked anyone on a deal. David would have made this company. Without him?” He looked around the room, gave all that youth and energy and equipment a small shrug and a sad smile. “We’ll probably go under within eighteen months.”

“Who profits if you do?”

He thought about it for a bit, drummed his palms on his bare knees. “A few rival companies, I suppose, but not in any huge way. We weren’t taking all that much business, so I’m not sure we’ll leave all that much business to scoop up if we go under.”

“You got the Warner Brothers gig.”

“True. But Eight Millimeter got the Branagh film Fox Searchlight did here, and Martini Shot landed the Mamet film. I mean, we all had our slices of pie, and none were too big or too little. I can tell you that nobody’s going to make millions or even hundreds of thousands because David’s no longer on the scene.” He placed his hands behind his head and looked up at the steel rafters and exposed heating pipes. “It would have been nice, though. As David used to say, we might not have gotten rich, but we might have gotten comfy.”

“What about the insurance?”

He used his hands to push his head back toward me, looked into my eyes with his elbows framing his face. “What about it?”

“I heard Karen Nichols was going broke trying to pay David’s medical bills.”

“And that led you to believe…?”

“That he wasn’t insured.”

Ray Dupuis studied me, his eyelids hooded, his body very still. I waited, but after a minute of his staring, I held out my hands.

“Look, Ray, I’m not after anyone in this place. You had to do some creative financing to keep afloat? Fine. Or you-”

“It was David,” he said quietly.

“What?”

He dropped his heels off the desk and his hands fell from behind his head.

“David sent a-” His face screwed up as if he were chewing tabs of acid, and he looked away for a minute. When he spoke again, his voice was almost a whisper. “You learn not to trust. Particularly in this business where everyone’s charming, everyone’s your friend, everyone loves you until you give them the bill. David, I swear to Christ, I had always believed was different. I trusted him.”

“But?”

“‘But.’” He snorted at the word, looked back up at the rafters with a defeated grin. “About six weeks before he was hurt, David canceled the insurance policy. Not on the equipment, just on the employees, himself included. The quarterly payment was due, and instead of paying it, he canceled. I’m sure he was rolling the dice-you know, borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, planning to move the money someplace else, maybe into the Steadicam.”

“Was money that tight?”

“Oh, yeah. My personal finances are tight, and Daddy’s locked the vault for a while. We have a lot of outstanding bills sitting on our clients’ desks, and once they’re paid, we’ll be okay, but the last few months have been lean. So, sure, I can see why David did it. I just don’t understand why he didn’t tell me, and why the money he saved never left the company bank account.”

“It’s still there?”

He nodded. “It was when he got hurt. I paid the insurance with it, bottomed out the rest of the account putting twenty percent down on the Steadicam, taking out a loan for the rest.”

“But you’re sure it was David who contacted the insurance agency?”

For a few minutes, he seemed unsure whether he should kick me out of the office or come all the way clean. In the end, he chose the latter, and I was glad, because I doubt I could have lived with the indignity of having my ass chucked to the street by a group of guys who’d collectively seen Star Wars more times than they’d had sex.

He glanced around to make sure no one in the warehouse was paying attention to us, and then he used a small key to unlock a lower desk drawer. After rifling through it for a few moments, he withdrew a single sheet of paper and handed it across the desk to me.

It was a copy of a letter from Wetterau sent to their insurance company. It expressly stated that Wetterau, Chief Financial Officer of Pickup on South Street, wished to cancel the HMO coverage of all employees, including himself. At the bottom, he’d signed it.

Ray Dupuis said, “The insurance company sent that to me when I filed a claim on David’s behalf. They refused to pay a dime. I came up with what I could, Karen came up with what she could before she stopped coming up with anything at all, and the bill keeps growing. David had no family, so ultimately, I guess, the state will pay for it, but Karen and I were both afraid he’d end up warehoused in some shitty facility, so we tried to get him first-class care for a while, but it was just too much for two people ultimately.”

“Did you know Karen well?”

He nodded several times. “Sure.”

“What’d you think of her?”

“She’s the girl the hero gets at the end of the movie. You know the one? Not the hot, sexy babe who ultimately turns out to be trouble, but the good girl. The one who’d never write you a Dear John if you were off at war. The one who’s always there, you just have to be smart enough to see it. Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo, if only Jimmy Stewart had been smart enough to see past her glasses.”

“Yeah.”

“It was kinda surreal.”

“How so?”

“Well, they don’t make women like Karen except in the movies.”

“Are you saying it was an act?”

“No. I was just never sure when I was with Karen if she knew who she was. If she’d worked so hard at becoming an ideal that she lost the person inside of her.”

“And once David was hurt?”

He shrugged. “She held on for a while, and then she cracked, man. I mean, it was horrible to see. She’d come in here, and I’d want to ask for her license to make sure I was dealing with the same person. She was drunk mostly, high. She was a fucking mess. It was like-what happens to you when you live your whole life like a movie, and the movie ends?”

I didn’t say anything.

“It’s like those child actors,” he said. “They play a part as long as they can, but they’re fighting a battle against hormonal evolution and they can’t win. One day they wake up, they’re no longer kids, they’re no longer movie stars, there’re no parts out there for them, and they drown.”

“So, Karen?”

His eyes filled for a moment and he blew air out through his mouth in a loud push. “Oh, Christ, she broke my heart. All our hearts. She lived for David. Anyone who saw them for two seconds knew that. And when David was hurt, she died. It just took her body four months to follow.”

We sat in silence for a bit, and then I handed him back the letter to the insurance company. He held it lightly in his hands and stared down at it. Eventually he smiled bitterly.

“No ‘P,’” he said, and shook his head.

“What’s that?”

He turned the letter in his hands so I could see it. “David’s middle name was Phillip. When we started this company, all of a sudden he signed his name with a big ‘P’ in the middle. Only on company documents and company checks, never anything else. I used to say the ‘P’ was for ‘pretentious,’ rag his ass a little bit about it.”

I looked at the signature. “But there’s no ‘P’ there.”

He nodded, then dropped the letter in the drawer. “I guess he wasn’t feeling particularly pretentious that day.”

“Ray.”

“Yeah?”

“Could I have a copy of that and something you have with his signature that does have the ‘P’?”

He shrugged. “Sure.” He found a memo David had written and signed with a wide, looping “P.”

I followed him to a grimy Xerox machine, and he placed the letter under the lid.

“What’re you thinking?” he asked me.

“I’m not sure yet.”

He pulled the copy out of the tray and handed it to me. “It’s just a ‘P,’ Mr. Kenzie.” He made a copy of the memo, gave it to me.

I nodded. “You got something with your signature on it?”

“Of course.” He led me back to the desk, handed me a memo he’d written and signed.

“You know what the trick to forgery is?” I said as I took the memo and turned it upside down.

“Good handwriting?”

I shook my head. “Gestalt.”

“Gestalt.”

“You see the signature as a shape, not a collection of singular letters.”

Carefully, under his overturned signature, I used a pen to copy the shape I saw above the pen point. When I finished, I turned it around, showed it to him.

He looked at it, opened his mouth, and raised his eyebrows. “That’s not bad. Wow.”

“And that’s my first try, Ray. Think what I could do with practice.”