Margin of Error Read online

  Catwalks skirted the towering two-story presses, one midway, the other at the top, accessible from the main deck by ladder. Dressed in dark blue uniforms, the pressmen wore steel-toed safety shoes, face masks, and ear protectors, like those used at the pistol range. Paper hats protected their hair from the inky mist, floating particles and splashes spewed by the presses. Blinking red lights flashed digital readouts monitoring the viscosity of the ink and the number of papers printed on each press.

  “Looks dangerous!” Lance said in my ear.

  “It is!” I shouted back. “People have lost fingers, hands. There’s zero tolerance when the presses are running. See? There’s the ON/OFF/SAFE switches in the control room. Over there is another emergency power switch to shut it down fast if anything gets caught up in the machinery.

  “The paper moves between the roller and the inked plates,” I shouted, “one roller to another; then by conveyor belt up to the mail room on the fifth floor, where they’re bundled; then slid down spiral chutes to the loading docks.”

  “We’re gonna shoot a scene down here later on!” Lance bellowed in my ear.

  “I didn’t see it in the script.”

  “Something new.” He wore a rueful expression. “There’s a lot that’s new!”

  “I hope they don’t have you running in, yelling, ‘Stop the press!’ It doesn’t happen.”

  The rhythmic pounding and gut-wrenching vibrations were overwhelming. I caught Lance’s glance. He was thinking the same thing.

  “Let’s get out of here!” I shouted. We burst back out into the hallway.

  “It’s like an earthquake in there,” Lance said, as we climbed the stairs. Slightly breathless, in the shadowy corridor above, as Niko wandered on ahead, Lance leaned in front of me, barring my way, and kissed me. Warm, sweet, and gentle accelerated to hot wet, and urgent as his body pushed mine against the cool, unyielding wall.

  “Careful,” I warned, catching my breath. “Your pants are too tight already.”

  “I won’t bite, unless you wanna be bit,” he said, backing off.

  Lost for a moment, I regained my senses.

  “Good,” I said briskly. “Want to see the plate-making room next?”

  “Let’s save that for another night.”

  This time I gave him my handkerchief, in case my lipstick had rubbed off on him. I could see he didn’t have one in his pants pocket.

  “Lance, there you are!” Wendy ignored Niko and me. “They need to do sound checks and get you into makeup.”

  Whisked off to a chair at the back of the newsroom, Lance was fitted with a giant bib by a makeup woman with a huge carrying case packed with tubes, vials, and jars.

  Ziff, still on the phone, laughed conspiratorially. “Uh-oh.” He caught my eye as I approached. “Britt wants her phone back.” Listening for a moment, he leaned over to scrutinize my feet.

  Shaking my head vigorously, I viciously mouthed the word no at him.

  “Can’t do it,” Ziff told the caller. “Gotta go now … Anytime. Bye-bye.”

  “I’m glad you two have bonded,” I said, “but just remember, he’s wanted by the law, so don’t get too chummy.”

  “What did he do? What did he do? Tell me all about it,” Ziff cried eagerly. “Was it something really gross?”

  As the night wore on, I learned that shooting a movie involves more waiting than action. Ziff filled his idle time by selling ghoul pool tickets for five bucks apiece. The names of show business celebrities, age seventy or older, were written on folded slips of paper and drawn from a box. If the celebrity you drew died within thirty days, you won. When there was more than one winner, they split the pot. When there were no winners, the pot grew. “Like the lottery,” Ziff explained.

  “That’s sick,” I said.

  “How many do you want?” he asked, pencil poised.

  “I don’t gamble,” I grumbled. “How you can you enjoy winning because some beloved show business figure died?”

  “Everybody’s gotta go sometime.” Ziff pouted.

  “I won eleven hundred dollars on Gene Kelly,” Maureen, the wardrobe mistress, said fondly.

  The scene they were shooting tonight was the first between Lance and Lexie. Did the old chemistry still linger? The inquiring minds of the entire crew, down to the caterer, the wardrobe mistress, and the Best Boy, a nice old fellow named Norman, all wanted to know, watching so eagerly it made me wonder how many were stringers for the Enquirer.

  Van Ness, Wendy, and a gaunt middle-aged scriptwriter hovering at the edge of the action all seemed to think that casting former lovers in the roles of former lovers was pure genius.

  “The love scenes will tell the story,” Maureen predicted, handing over five dollars for the ghoul pool and selecting a name from the box. “Hell,” she said, unfolding it. “I got Ann Miller again. That woman will outlive all of us.”

  Gossip flew, while camera tracks were laid out across the newsroom. I heard that Rad Johnson was still officially aboard as AD, though not listed on today’s call sheet; that Lance’s old studio was trying to woo him back; and that Lexie was rumored to be dating Stallone.

  The gaunt writer, Kirby Walters, a script doctor from LA, complained bitterly about his accommodations. He had been promised at least two rooms, he griped, at the small Collins Avenue hotel where three floors had been reserved for Margin of Error crew. Instead, he had been lodged in a cubicle with an alley view and no place to plug in his laptop. Standing by like an expectant father, he explained the newly written scene that was about to be shot.

  Cassie Malone, Lexie’s character, appears unannounced in the newsroom in search of Gardiner Bowles. (No clue as to how somebody who looked like Lexie could slip unnoticed past newspaper security.) Cassie, a slick con woman, is an old flame. The back story, Walters said, was that they had once worked on assignment together, to recover a fortune in stolen drug money from the cartel. They had become lovers, but when Bowles was wounded, cornered by Colombian hit men, Cassie left him for dead, took the money, and ran.

  Not bad casting, I thought. The latter in many ways matched Lance’s description of their divorce.

  Cassie now needs Gardiner’s help, but he has other priorities, an important mission. She really believed he was dead, she insists, which was why she bolted with the money. She learned he was alive, she says, when she glimpsed him at a recent press conference. She has invested her stolen fortune in a major resort hotel venture in Cuba. Ironically, her partners, Spanish businessmen, are now trying to cut her out of the deal. When she confronted them, somebody tried to kill her. She cannot turn to the courts or the authorities because her investment is illegal under U.S. law. When Gardiner refuses to help her, she threatens to expose him and blow his cover as a reporter.

  Technicians played with spotlights as Hodges, the director, crouched in front of them. Desktops were rearranged and Polaroids snapped, for continuity and so their former states of disarray could be accurately restored, part of the deal with the paper. Hodges joined the cameramen in a long slow dolly sweep down a track, stopping frequently to mark the floor where the cameras would pause to shoot certain angles.

  Lance and Lexie waited on far sides of the room, avoiding eye contact as the production manager rehearsed the extras until they achieved the right voice levels. I joined Lance’s camp, along with Niko, his assistant, a makeup person, a script girl, Ziff, and others. Lottie also showed up to watch, after an evening of line dancing at Desperadoes. Our separate sections were like the bride’s and the groom’s sides at a wedding. Or ringside at a prize fight.

  They really do say “Action!” and snap the striped board. Take One. Lexie walked into the newsroom on cue, wearing as scared, uncertain, and vulnerable an expression as could be mustered up by an immensely rich and famous supermodel. She scanned the newsroom for Lance. Her face was to flood with relief when she saw him. Instead it looked more like the expression I wear when I change the sandbox. Taking a deep breat
h, she walked toward him. Takes two and three and four and five, the cameras shooting from every conceivable angle. No dialogue, just her.

  Then they shot Lance at his desk, with the reporters and copy-boys, all extras, busy in the background. When he glanced up and saw her, his expression was to change from startled recognition, to longing, then firm resolve.

  Except the first time it was more like Oh, shit.

  They shot it over and over until the director finally got what he wanted.

  “Lordy,” Lottie murmured, “he still loves her.”

  “In the movie,” I said. “That’s acting.”

  “Didn’t know he was that good.”

  By the time the stars finally exchanged dialogue, I was mesmerized.

  CASSIE:

  “I didn’t know you were alive.”

  GARDINER:

  “You didn’t wait around to find out.”

  She then related her problem with the bad guys, over and over, with many retakes due to forgotten or bobbled lines. Finally, she got it right.

  GARDINER:

  “How did you get involved with these people, Lexie?”

  Shouts of “Cut! Cut!”

  “It’s Cassie, Lance, not Lexie!”

  He got it right next time, but a phone interrupted, ringing in mid-scene. “Cut! Cut! Somebody get that!” Hodges shouted. “And get those phones turned off!”

  The offending phone was mine. I tried to shrink into the woodwork. Who the hell would call the newsroom at 4 A.M.?

  Security, they said, looking for me.

  “Delivery for you,” the guard at the employees’ entrance said. “Flowers.”

  Now I understood why Lance had wanted to be sure I would be there. Who else could persuade a florist to deliver at that hour? I asked the guard to send them up.

  “You better come down,” he said.

  I went, smiling until I saw it.

  The arrangement waited on the security desk. A wreath. Wilted flowers, spray-painted black, REST IN PEACE, the ribbon said. My stomach churned. Suddenly I felt bone weary and wanted to go home. Fantasy is so much more fun than real life.

  YOU WERE WARNED said the unsigned black-bordered card.

  The security guard had thought it a joke, the delivery man said that was what his boss understood as well. Niko thought we should make a police report. I did not. I considered Stephanie more annoying than a threat. We agreed not to trouble Lance with it while he was working.

  The last scene of the night, squeezed in before dawn, was Lance, gun in hand, dashing up the cement stairs from the pressroom. Lexie and her entourage had gone, the last press run was history, and there was no noise, only Lance’s increasingly heavy breathing. Hodges and Van Ness seemed perverse, ordering take after take after take. Each time Lance charged at top speed, hurtling the steep steps two at time.

  He was so winded and red in the face after ten or twelve takes, I worried that he might have a heart attack.

  Breathing hard, he slumped against the wall for a few moments as they paused to reposition the lights before the next take. He gasped for air, glancing at Niko and me as the makeup woman blotted his brow.

  “Quick,” I suggested. “Have another cigarette.”

  When they finished for the night, the crew swept through the newsroom putting everything back the way it was. Lance seemed weary and preoccupied. It was my turn to buy lunch, so I invited him for a late one, at my favorite place. He said he would call, and we parted at dawn. I drove home alone, too tired to worry about Stephanie.

  My phone rang at one.

  “Ready?” Lance wanted to know.

  “Give me an hour.”

  I drove through the guarded gate to his house at two thirty. The temperature hovered at 70 and the weather was breezy with whitecaps on an emerald-green bay. Puffy cumulus clouds and wisps of cirrus drifted in a rich blue ceramic sky.

  Lance was waiting dressed casually as I had suggested. A cotton pullover, jeans, baseball cap, and shades.

  He swung into the passenger’s side without hesitation. I like a man who has no problem with me driving. “Where’s Niko?”

  “I escaped my captors.”

  “Swell. Are they bound and gagged in the wine cellar?”

  “I felt the need for unsupervised play.” He shot me a meaningful glance, then looked startled as I turned west on the causeway, toward the city.

  “When you said casual,” he said slowly, “somehow I thought we might be going to your place.”

  “Wrong.” We breezed up onto the Dolphin Expressway, then south on 1-95, got off at Brickell, and shot across the Rickenbacker Causeway to Key Biscayne.

  “So, you’re recovered from the stair scene?”

  “I better be. They’ll probably wanna shoot it another thirty, forty times tonight. And if it makes it past the final cut, you may actually glimpse it for two, maybe three seconds.” He shook his head. “Last time my heart rate was that high, I was naked.”

  I ignored his look. At the far end of the island I turned into Cape Florida State Park, down an unpaved road into a nearly empty parking lot. Deserted wooden picnic tables and barbecue pits were scattered through a strip of woods bordering a sandy ocean beach.

  “There’s a place out here?” he asked, as we got out.

  “Yes.” I unlocked the trunk and lifted out my big wicker picnic basket. “Right here.”

  The site was perfect. Absolutely deserted. We spread my pink linen cloth over the rough wooden table. Matching napkins. Real silver. A thermos of hot soup, a bottle of cold wine, roasted chicken, French bread and fruit, beneath moody Australian pines, with the sounds of the surf pounding the beach and the wind playing in the treetops.

  “My new favorite restaurant,” Lance called it.

  Mellow from the wine, we strolled the sand after lunch, following the surf to the Cape Florida lighthouse. “This was the scene of the crime. The first murder that we know of in Key Biscayne took place right here.”

  “Somebody kick sand in a beachboy’s face?”

  I shook my head. “Seminole Indians had been forced down the coast and they attacked. Wounded the lighthouse keeper, killed his assistant, burned, and looted. ‘Bout a hundred and sixty years ago.”

  “They still in jail awaiting trial?”

  “So you’re familiar with our justice system.”

  I opened a bag of what was left of the bread, tore it to shreds, and we fed it to the seagulls, laughing and ducking as they swooped down, squawking, catching crusts in midair, quarreling and screaming until only crumbs remained.

  Lance found a perfect trumpet shell, all swirls and spires, presented it with a flourish, and I slipped it in my pocket. Then we sat on the sand, shoes off, looking out to sea. “It’s so great to relax like this.” He leaned back and sighed. “We’re running behind schedule, over budget, and everybody’s driving me nuts.”

  “Why do you work so hard,” I said drowsily, “make so many movies?”

  He paused. “I guess it’s because no matter how much they pay me, I’m always afraid that nobody will ever offer me another job. And there’s the money. A lot of people depend on me. My agent, my manager, my family, people on my payroll. So I do what I have to do.”

  Colorful sailboats darted across the water, and a flock of pelicans skimmed low above the waves before soaring in perfect V formation into a travel-poster sky.

  “You know I’m not stage trained I’m no Shakespearean actor.” He sifted sand between his fingers. “I got my training doing commercials and on a soap opera. My movies aren’t highbrow, but I give every one my best shot, try to be original. But I worry…”His voice trailed off.

  “About what?” Who would ever believe he’s as insecure as the rest of us? I thought.

  “Lots of things. Making the wrong decision… I left WFI, the studio I’d been with forever, thinking Titan would be a big improvement. But the way things are going with this pictur
e so far…”

  “Did you burn bridges? Could you go back?”

  “Hell, they want me back, didn’t want me to leave, but I won’t ever work for that guy again. I’ve told ‘em in no uncertain terms. The studio’s not the same since Bernard Gettinger took over. He was big-time in Vegas. To him moviemaking is not an art, it’s strictly business.” He sighed, his rugged profile pensive. “And I worry about getting older, when I can’t be the action hero. When the only role I can land is somebody’s father or grandfather. I already have to work twice as hard in the gym to maintain the body for action flicks.”

  “Why don’t you do other kinds of movies, even comedies? Go out on a limb.”

  “The few times I did, it broke and I fell off. Fans are fickle. When they like you in a certain kind of role, they’re pissed off and stay away in droves when you deviate from that.”

  “Try it again. You’d still have action movies to fall back on.”

  “Yeah, the ones the critics love to crucify.”

  “Hah, they’re usually overeducated pseudo-intellectual wannabes with no clue about what the average person really likes. The guy we’ve got at the paper? If he loves a movie, it is always foreign or incomprehensible. He gave a must-see rave and four stars to an art film last year, never mentioning that it was in French with no subtitles. He assumed that everybody spoke French. Phones rang off the hook. People who bought tickets based on his review were livid. That’s a critic. You’re a major star. You communicate, you touch people. That’s what counts.”

  We strolled back to our picnic table, his arm around me. The Australian pines were still moody, the surf still pounded the beach, the wind still played in the treetops, but something was different. The sun, blazing in the western sky, blinded me for a moment and I was not sure what I saw. My T-Bird was still there, but the windows were smashed and all four tires flat.

  I did not think we were followed. Apparently, I was wrong. Or perhaps, as I suggested, this was random vandalism. Lance was sure it was not. He was right. You were warned said the note amid the broken glass on the windshield.