Black River (33 page)

“Is that right?” She smiled and placed one hand on Nick’s knee. “You probably don’t even have to lock the doors on your boats when you leave.”

“Used to be that way. Now the marina gets too many tourists. This is supposed to be for boat owners and their guests only, but people like hangin’ at the marina, and they come down the docks like ducks waddling to a lake. I have a key to Dave’s boat, Sean’s boat, and they have keys to my boat.”

“I’m looking for a key. Never found it, though. Maybe one day.”

“What key are you looking for?”

“I’m looking for the key to my heart, or more specifically, the man who can unlock the passion in my heart.”

Nick grinned. “I’m a locksmith, but not a thief of hearts. It’s not a single key—the key to the soul, it’s a combination of respect, honor, love, and protection that might open your heart.” Nick leaned in to kiss her. She responded, moaning slightly.

Nick suddenly felt tired, his arms and legs heavy. He blinked hard, Malina’s face beginning to blur. He felt sweat on his brow, perspiration
trickling down his ribcage. Malina’s hot breath in his ear, her hands on his chest, moving to his genitals. She whispered, “Where is the key to Sean’s boat?”

Nick stared at her face, his eyes trying to focus, his penis numb to her touch, his mind disoriented. She hiked up her dress and straddled his lap, leaned down and held his face in both her hands. “Nicky, listen to me…Sean needs help. Where did you put his keys?”

Nick grunted, his voice just above a whisper. “Hangin’ from a mermaid in the galley.” Nick saw the woman’s face come closer, could smell the wine on her breath, his lips numb to her kiss. She jumped, Jack-in-the box style, from his lap to the floor. She smoothed out her dress and walked to the galley.

Malina found three sets of keys hanging from a figurine of a bare-breasted mermaid magnet stuck to the door of the refrigerator. She took all three keys, walked back to the salon, picked her hat off the barstool, turned to Nick and blew him a kiss.

Nick watched the woman walk out the door, the sunlight becoming narrow, black edges, the light at the end of a dark tunnel, coming straight ahead at his body. He was unable to move, to scream, to close his eyes. All that moved were his disoriented thoughts and a single tear that rolled down his cheek.

O
’Brien followed a college-aged man with a pizza delivery. He walked quickly through the Hilton Hotel parking lot, two large pizza boxes in his hands, and keys on a ring attached to his belt and rattling as he stepped across the lobby and into the elevator. O’Brien slipped in before the doors closed and said, “Smells great. Those for the film editors?”

“Yep. You an editor?”

“Not yet. I do what they tell me.”

“I know how that goes.”

“I’ll pay for the pizzas now and take them in. What do we owe you?”

“Twenty-one even.”

O’Brien handed the man three ten-dollar bills. “Keep the change.”

“Cool. Thanks dude.”

The elevator doors opened and O’Brien stepped out. He walked down the hall to the penthouse suites. The sign on one door read:

BLACK RIVER
Post-production. No admittance
.

O’Brien knocked, opened the door and said, “Pizza delivery.”

“Come on in,” came a voice from somewhere in the back.

O’Brien entered and walked around tables set up with monitors, cables, computers, keyboards. The door was open to an adjoining room, which had even more equipment. O’Brien could hear the voices of actors, the fast stopping and starting of the same scene. One man stood from the long table and said, “You can set the pizzas down there. What’d the bill come to?”

“No charge. It’s on me. A small price to pay for an introduction into the world of editing. I’m Sean O’Brien. Are you Oscar?”

“Yes, named for the golden and elusive statue. My dad was a movie buff. Come on in, Sean, and sit down. You got here fast.”

“I was sort of in the neighborhood.”

Oscar Roth’s gray hair was pulled back in a short ponytail. His hazel eyes were playful. A diamond earring in one ear. He wore a white, button-down oxford shirt outside his jeans. Soft loafers. No socks. He said, “Sean, this is Chris Goddard.” Roth gestured toward a slender man in a black T-shirt with a sharp face sitting in front of two large, sixty-inch monitors, light from the screens reflecting off his glasses. He glanced up and said, “Nice to meet you. Thanks for lunch.”

“You’re welcome. I appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity to sit in and watch. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to a career internship, even if it’s only for a couple of hours. I’ll know if I’m having a creative mid-life crisis or a career change.”

Roth said to Goddard, “Sean’s a friend of my old pal, Shelia Winters. He’s a charter boat captain out of Ponce Marina.”

“Cool.”

O’Brien said, “What you guys do is what’s really cool. Catching fish is mostly luck.”

“Let’s eat and chat,” said Roth, opening a pizza box and lifting two slices to a paper plate.

As the men ate, O’Brien asked questions about the editing process, skillfully leading the conversation closer to the day Jack Jordan was killed on set. O’Brien smiled and said, “I’m fascinated by the whole filmmaking process from script to screen. Do you have any behind-the-scenes footage you can share, something that might show how a stunt was done?”

Roth swallowed a bit of peperoni pizza and said, “We have more BTS footage than movie footage.”

“I was recently at the old antebellum home, Wind ‘n Willows, the crew is using for some interior and exterior scenes. Do you have any BTS from there?”

“We do have some.” Roth used a paper towel to wipe the pepperoni grease from his lips and gestured toward an entire table filled with external hard drives. “Chris, look that up. Mark was cutting that BTS for the studio’s
marketing department yesterday. We had a young publicist, all legs and ass, in here yesterday from the studio. She was putting together a social marketing campaign for the film and was pulling some of the BTS from that plantation. This girl was batting around phrases like, not since
Gone with the Wind
has there been an epic film like
Black River
, blah, blah, blah. Cue it up, Chris.”

Chris Goddard nodded and played scenes shot in and around the Wind ‘n Willows. O’Brien recognized some of the actors, most out of costume and make-up, going over the script with the director. Other shots captured crew moving lights and equipment into the mansion. The camera shot panned to the left as a black limousine was pulling up in front of the stately white columns. Two men dressed in dark Armani suits and darker glasses got out of the car. A silver-haired man in a light pink polo shirt, gray slacks and wrap-around sunglasses followed them. Another man with a bad comb-over on a scallion-shaped bald head, wearing a navy-blue sports coat, white T-shirt, pair of five-hundred-dollar washed-denim jeans, led the man in the pink shirt into the great house.

O’Brien looked at Roth and asked, “What’s the parade all about? Who spilled out of the limo?”

“The gents in the dark suits are security…bodyguards. The guy in the pink shirt employs them. Name’s Frank Sheldon, a software zillionaire who’s got skin in the game on the film. He’ll get a producer or an executive producer’s credit. That’s what putting up twenty million will buy you. If the movie’s a blockbuster on the order of Titanic or Avatar, he’ll make a bundle, in spite of studio accounting. If it flops, he has a stack of Blu-ray DVDs he can play for his rich buddies and point out his name in the credit roll. Money to freakin’ burn, and that’s the name of that tune. The dude in the jeans and jacket is the CEO of Triton Global Films. Name’s Timothy Levin.”

“Do you have shots inside the house?”

“Of course. Roll them, Chris.”

O’Brien watched closely as the entourage entered the great house. The director joined the CEO as they showed Frank Sheldon around the film set. Sheldon paused by the baby grand piano and pointed toward the far wall. The camera slowly panned up.

On the wall was the painting of the woman that O’Brien now knew was Angelina Hopkins.

O
’Brien ignored the slight vibration of an in-coming call to the phone in his pocket. He watched the editor’s screen, watched Frank Sheldon’s body language staring at the painting—the assessing eyes, the popping of muscles at the base of man’s jawline. Sheldon looked at the director standing next to the art director and said, “The face that launched a thousand ships might have been Helen of Troy…but the face of that woman in the painting is a face for a man to defend to his death. What a gorgeous southern beauty. Where’d you find that painting?”

“It’s on loan,” the art director said, using his hands like a football coach signaling a time out. The camera shot abruptly ended and picked up on the next scene of Sheldon shaking hands with the director and meeting the cast and more of the crew.

Oscar Roth leaned back in his chair and said, “Let’s show you some footage from the actual film, you’ll see the difference in quality compared to the stuff shot for BTS.”

O’Brien nodded. “I’d love to see how you cut together some of the battle scenes. How about the first Confederate cavalry charge? Isn’t that how the film will open?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. Unfortunately, that huge scene involving hundreds of extras and re-enactors was when the accident happened. What a horrible fluke. Just goes to show you when your time’s up, it’s up.”

“That’s what I hear. How do you edit around something like that?”

Roth shrugged, wiping his hands on a paper towel, sipping iced tea. “It’s easy, really. You just don’t put that scene in the story. Regardless, we didn‘t have cameras trained specifically on him when he was shot. Tragic damn accident. In all my years in the biz, I’ve seen my share of stunt man and stunt woman accidents, but never anyone shot on set.”

O’Brien nodded. “Did you have cameras set up capturing the advancement of the Union forces as the barrage of shots happened?”

“Oh, hell yes. Earl Brice, the DP, overshoots. And all that footage winds up right here in the edit suite. There were four cameras catching that scene, and one of them was shooting in ultra-slow motion. Brice had a scene shot from a crane and another one shot from an aerial drone. Want to see what it looked like?”

“Absolutely.”

“Line those shots up, Chris. They should be in number twelve bin.”

“Gotcha.” He used his boney fingers to find and play the scenes.

Roth said, “These aren’t rough-cuts. They’ve been rendered out in six-K high resolution. The camera is shooting at a thousand frames per second, and when played back at twenty-four frames a second, we get ultra-slow-motion.”

The scene showed more than two-dozen union troops advancing through the palmetto trees and thicket. A squad commander issued an order to fire. Each man shouldered a musket, and all fired at the same time. O’Brien watched closely. Catching something out of the corner of his eye. He said, “That’s really cool. Can you play it once again?”

“Yes,” said Roth, then proceeding to tell O’Brien how the scene was cut together.

“Freeze it there,” O’Brien said. “Now back it up a few frames.” Discreetly, O’Brien pressed the audio record button on his phone, placing the phone in his shirt pocket.

“Did you see something?” asked Roth, leaning closer in his swivel chair.

“Something was different from one rifle compared to all the rest.” O’Brien pointed to the screen. “See the fifth soldier from the far left?”

“Yes,” Roth said. “What about him?”

“It’s not him. It’s what came out of the barrel of his musket.”

“What came out?” asked Goddard.

“Nothing. That’s the point. Nothing visible. In slow motion, we can easily see the paper wads each re-enactor shot from his barrel. That indicates each man was firing blanks. The paper wads drifted down like confetti. But not with the fifth soldier from the far left. His barrel discharged smoke and a solid object, something black that is only a tiny blur even a thousand frames per second, or ultra-slow motion. Stop and hold the frame the millisecond before smoke comes from the barrel.”