The Midnight Road (15 page)

“He’s a serious asshole.”

“So are you. I hire my crew based on competency, though, not personality. If I did, I’d have to clear all the desks out of this place and take up ballroom dancing.”

“And just why do you think I need to get into treatment?”

“Therapy. Treatment is PC for rehab nowadays.” She ran her tongue alongside the dry teeth that her mauled lip could never close over. “I don’t have all day long, but I could give you the highlights if you’d really like. Should I bother to lay it out? You’ve got too much coming at you from all directions, that’s part of the reason why you need to talk to someone.”

“I’m not going to see that prick.”

“You are or you can start hitting the Help Wanted pages tomorrow.”

She had the staunch expression of his mother. Her eyes were hard and dark and brimming with pain and disappointment. Every woman he’d ever cared about in any capacity had finally smacked him with that look. Unlike his mother, he knew Sierra would do a lot more than sigh. She didn’t bluff or bullshit. She really would kick him out.

Doing the job was all Flynn really had, it was everything that mattered.

He nodded and said, “All right.”

Sierra let out a small, tight smile. “I’ll let you make the appointment. Do it this week. Leave the gun when you go see him.”

“Sure,” he said as she retreated up the hallway. “Don’t want to make myself a slave to temptation.”

The search for Emma Waltz had turned up nothing, but he didn’t have top clearance and wasn’t as computer-savvy as Sierra. He started another on Angela Soto. Maybe she was in the system. Maybe he’d been wrong and he’d crossed Angela Soto somewhere along the line. She’d died for him, but had she been a complete stranger? He waited while the screen flickered through names and dates and information, hunting a match. There wasn’t one.

The phone rang. It was Jessie Gray. She even knew his office number.

“So,” she said, “how about taking me to the movies tonight?”

“I prefer late afternoon. Five o’clock showing. I don’t know what’s playing.”

He should’ve known she’d be ahead of him.

She said, “That’s okay, I do.”

TEN

The 1948 version of
The Killers
starring Edmond O’Brien and Burt Lancaster was showing at the Paradigm. Jessie Gray left her car at Flynn’s place and together they took the L.I.R.R. in to Penn Station, nabbed the A train down to the Village. She liked to walk a step or two ahead of him. She had a fast gait and he sensed she was worried this might not all pan out. He hoped she wouldn’t ask about his personal journey again.

They got to the theater and she started to ease her way down an aisle toward the back. He said, “Sixth row center, always.”

“I thought that was just for plays.”

“It’s for everything with a stage.”

He sat and she made herself comfortable beside him. She laid her handbag on the seat next to her and the thing landed with the weight of a barbell. He tried to figure out what was in it beside the usual lipstick and tissues: a microcassette recorder, iPod, cell phone, a couple of books on film noir so she could get a clue on his hobby, a can of Mace (the hard-core stuff, no pepper spray for this one) and probably a file with his entire history tamped down into it. Something she could study and read on the train.

“I know you come here often,” she said.

“Every chance I get.”

“Do they only play film noir?”

“No,” he said, “but they mostly show classics from the forties and fifties.”

“The kind they don’t make anymore? The place is completely empty. How do they stay open?”

“The hard-core movie buffs show up here for the later showings on the circuit.”

She was a writer. Words triggered her interest. This one made her stir. “Circuit?”

“Yeah. Most of them either live out in Queens or Brooklyn or way uptown at the north end of Manhattan. They live on social security, welfare and their pensions. Most of them are elderly or social misfits. They live for nothing besides film. Not movies, but film. The classics. They project themselves in and think Bogie’s still alive. If they’re coming down from uptown they hit the Aleister for a first show, then the Courant and then the Twin Golden Revival. They’ll get here around nine o’clock. If they’re swinging in from Brooklyn, they’ll hit the Bowery Headlight and then the Paragon Twin and the Marquee Classic. They’ll show up for the seven o’clock and later showings. But that’s mostly on the weekends.”

“So you get the theater to yourself every time?”

“Pretty close. If I come directly here from the Island.”

“I never knew there was such an underground movement of film fanatics.”

“Write it up for
Parade.”

“Perhaps I will,” she said. “I still find it surprising theaters like this can exist. How’s a place like this make money? I only saw two people working the front counter.”

“Two’s all you need. The guy who takes the tickets, he’s Huey. The lady who sells the candy, she’s Hazel. They’ve been married for twenty-five years. There’s a projectionist up there I’ve never seen, but they refer to him as Gramps. He probably is. Three people run the whole thing.”

“They do it for love?” she asked with a subtle jab.

“I doubt it. Huey and Hazel don’t seem too happy most of the time. But nobody who’s been married twenty-five years does.”

“I noticed alcohol on his breath.”

“Scotch. He runs up the block and has a snort between pictures.”

“So not everyone is entranced by the magic of Hollywood?”

“No one who has to grind a living off it.”

She sat straighter and said, “That sounds like it might actually be profound.”

“Don’t fool yourself.” The door at the back opened and Flynn angled his chin. “Here comes another true believer now.”

Florence was an earthy, straw-haired lady with a dented face hard as oak. She had a short, squat body that looked like it was ratcheted too tightly at all the joints. She carried a tub of popcorn and a couple of boxes of candy, kind of trundling along. She stopped at Flynn’s aisle, peering at where he sat hunched in his seat. He stood and when she saw it was him she cried, “Flynn!”

“Hello, Florence.”

She jittered excitedly, a few kernels of popcorn falling to the floor. “It’s Edmond again, they’re giving us Edmond.”

“It’s been a while since Edmond has dropped by. Last one was, what,
D.O.A.
?”

“The Hitch-Hiker.
Nine weeks ago, I believe. The best film directed by the star Ida Lupino. Oh, it’s so lovely to think that film noir even worked its magic on Hollywood starlets. The ones normally known for gala events and high-drama vehicles. Before she became queen of the B’s.”

“You’re right, and Ida knew her business too. She knew how to get the best out of O’Brien and Lovejoy and Talman. And she cowrote the script too. Ida knew her way around a rough story.”

“Ida, when will they give us Ida again?”

“I don’t know, but she’ll turn up again for a visit. I haven’t looked at the schedule, but it looks like next week is
White Heat.”

“James and George! How wonderful it will be to see them again.”

“It may be my first time seeing Jimmy shout, ‘Top of the world, Ma!’ on the big screen.”

“Get the quote correct, dear. ‘Made it, Ma! Top o’ the world!’ You’re in for such a treasure.”

“I know it. What’s brought you in this early, Florence? You usually don’t show at the Paradigm until the nine o’clock.”

“My daughter Vicki moved back in with me. Her third marriage hit the skids and she’s back home, bartending, complaining every minute. My granddaughter Maggie is seventeen and I worry about her. She runs with a fast crowd, but she’s not stupid. She knows it’s going nowhere, and she’s fighting the pressure. I like to get home early so we can talk before she goes to bed. It’s the best time to get through to them, at the end of the day, before she tries to sneak out while her mother is still out working the bar crowd. Vicki can’t help herself, she takes after her father. There’s still time to keep Maggie from going down that dead-end alley. I’m doing my best, but it’s a struggle.”

“You’ll get the job done,” Flynn said, believing it.

“I hope so. Maybe I can talk her into coming next week when they give us Jimmy and George.”

Flynn ushered her to the other side of the theater, where she liked to sit in the third row near the fire door and see everything on a slant for some reason. She handed him one of the boxes of candy without a word, and he took it without looking. When he got back to his seat, Jessie Gray was staring at him with a lot of deep thought playing across her face.

“You like Dots?” he asked.

“Good Christ, do they still make those? I can’t believe anyone ever ate them.”

“Nobody does, but they’re part of the moviegoing experience.”

“She talks like they’re still alive, those actors,” Jessie said quietly. Her voice was heavy with sympathy and a touch of distaste.

“They are,” he told her. “In a very necessary way. Alive on the screen. As a part of history, a communal fantasy. It’s the kind of thing you hear all the time
—they’re alive on the screen—
it sounds stupid and maybe a little crazy, but it comes from an honest place. Few people take it to heart the way the real fans do. Everyone likes movies, but some folks, they’re a whole other level of fan.”

“She probably has nothing else in her life except these fantasies.”

“Don’t be appalled, Jessie, it’s not fair. She’s actually a pretty sharp lady. She’s gone through a lot. You’re right, she doesn’t have much else except these movies, but if you’re going to be disgusted—”

“I wasn’t disgusted, for heaven’s sake.”

“—then don’t forget to be disgusted about the guy putting in a twelve-hour day, stuck in a loveless marriage, who’ll probably take a header when he’s fifty and his arteries are as hard as high-tensile steel.”

“I wasn’t being judgmental.” Her hand reached out and clamped over his own. It was an urging grip, unusually strong for a girl, trying to invoke validity.

“You were,” he said, “you just didn’t realize it. Don’t let it bother you. We all discriminate.”

“I was not
discriminating.
You are so infuriating! I could crack you one.”

It made him laugh. They settled in to watch the movie. Burt Lancaster gets his ticket punched ten minutes in and the film unfolds through flashback. Jessie Gray’s hand brushed against his arm. This didn’t feel like a date, but it had been so long since he’d been on one, he couldn’t quite grasp the dynamics. The dirty-old-man syndrome continued to throw him off. The fact that they were arguing a bit was comforting to him. He felt the way he had toward the end of his marriage.

Burt is led off the straight and narrow by Ava Gardner, a world-class femme fatale. Edmond O’Brien searches backwards through Burt’s life to discover why he left an insurance policy to an old cleaning lady he barely knew. The script had some nice zags to it. Flynn had never read the original Hemingway story, and he promised himself he would.

Halfway through Florence got up, hugged her mostly untouched box of popcorn to her chest and hurried back up the aisle and out the door.

“Is she leaving?”

“She always has to go to the ladies’ room at the halfway mark. A while back they discovered she had colon cancer and took out a significant part of her small intestine. She probably hasn’t made it through an entire movie the last five or six years. She can’t go the full two hours.”

“The poor woman.” Jessie Gray’s eyes were large and moist in the flickering light of the film. “But all that popcorn and candy…why does she…?”

“Because it’s a movie. You do certain things out of love for the entire experience, even if they cost you. It reminds her of Saturday nights at the theater with her family when she was a kid. It reminds her of her husband back when they were dating.”

“That’s why she gave you a whole box of Dots?”

“And that’s why I’m eating the goddamn things,” he said, swallowing another.

“My God, I would never leave the house if—”

“She’s tough. She slugs it out every hour of every day. She’s going to show her granddaughter the right way out of that alley too, I bet.”

“You’ve got a lot of faith.”

“In some things. You want to do your
Parade
piece, you can start with her.”

“I’m starting with you.”

“I still don’t know what my personal journey is. Okay, watch this, Edmond is closing in on Ava and the crew that did Burt wrong.”

They watched the rest of the movie. Edmond tracked down each member of the gang until he had the full story of why Burt got bumped off. He showed up Ava for what she really was and he sneered while he did it. Flynn had to get to a Barnes Noble and find a collection of Hemingway’s fiction.

Gramps turned on the lights. Flynn stretched out in his seat and tried to keep from yawning. It was six thirty. He wondered what the protocol was now. If he was supposed to take Jessie Gray to dinner. If she expected him to pull a few moves. If he could get over his fear of ever showing off the gray hairs on his chest. If she’d Mace him in the face for leaning in too far and making a dive for a kiss.