Margin of Error Page 18

  “Dammit. Stephanie.” I scanned the woods. Nobody in sight.

  “She must be gone,” he said, as I brushed glass off the shiny new-car finish “It’s my fault I’ll have everything fixed. Get you new tires.”

  “I have insurance,” I said mildly, surprised myself that I was not more upset. If we let Stephanie ruin our day, she won. He called Niko, asking him to send us a flatbed tow truck and bring us a car.

  We waited, lounging at the picnic table, finishing the wine and telling our life stories.

  “As much as I gripe about the business,” Lance said, “I love movies. Always have, since I was a kid. I walk into a theater and my heart beats faster. I’m ready. Ready to be entertained, enlightened, transported. I want to laugh, to cry, to gasp in astonishment, to forget the real world and let the filmmakers push my buttons. I want to sit in that seat and forget who I am and where I am for two hours. I’m so lucky to be part of all that.”

  I understood. To a lesser degree my job, the stories I become involved in, can transport me, make me forget my own life.

  Niko, behind the wheel of a dark blue Mark VIII, and the tow truck arrived almost simultaneously. He was not happy and became even less pleased when Lance insisted he accompany the tow truck driver and leave the Lincoln with us.

  “What are you doing out here? Remember what happened last time you didn’t listen? How do you expect me to do my job?” he grumbled, climbing into the truck.

  “He’ll get over it,” Lance said as they pulled away. We grinned, like schoolkids playing hooky, as I put the things I had removed from the T-Bird into the Lincoln. The truck pulled away, Niko watching us over his shoulder.

  “Guess we should go,” I said. We both hated to leave this place.

  He bent to brush kiss my cheek, but I turned my head at that moment and something happened. Ten minutes later we were still engulfed in that first kiss. We were making out like teenagers. I vaguely heard the sound of a car pulling up as he bent me back over the hood of the Lincoln. I opened one eye: a harmless elderly couple in an old station wagon.

  We ignored them. They stopped to watch.

  “Don’t they have a home?” the old lady said reprovingly. She and the man, who wore plaid Bermuda shorts, stood staring.

  We parted lips and glanced up.

  “No,” Lance said, “we don’t have a home. That’s why we’re here.”

  We slid into the car, breathless, as the couple continued to stare.

  “Isn’t that…?” she began.

  “He looks like…” he said.

  As we drove away, I felt warm and flushed. It was all so romantic, so … so much like a movie.

  14

  The car phone rang as Lance drove me home. “We’re shooting on the beach tonight, instead of at the paper,” he said as he hung up. “They decided the weather is perfect for a love scene.”

  “We could’ve told them that. What kind of love scene?”

  “I’m afraid Van Ness has seen From Here to Eternity too many times.”

  “You mean that sexy scene in the surf? Burt Lancaster? Deborah Kerr? Watch out for the riptide, it’s treacherous. Want me to come?”

  He shook his head. “It’s a closed set, as closed as it can be out in the open.”

  I nodded. The filmmakers wanted the site kept hush-hush, he said. A stretch of Matheson Hammock, with off-duty cops and security barring beach access. I remembered the scene Lottie had talked about in Dead by Sundown. “Bare-ass naked,” had been her subtle description.

  “Will you take your clothes off?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All of them?”

  “Damn close.”

  “What about Lexie?” My mouth felt dry.

  “Second nature to her, she’s an exhibitionist at heart.”

  “I guess all actors are.”

  He shot me a quick glance.

  “Too bad about the sea lice, the sand fleas, and the Portuguese man-of-war—those are transparent jellyfish with long tentacles. They wash up on the sand but you can’t see them. Their sting is pretty nasty.

  “Then there’s that sand you’ll have to lie on. Actually it’s crushed coral rock with sharp edges, like ground glass. To say nothing of the wandering homeless, the prurient cops, the paparazzi who will sniff you out, high-risers with binoculars, and all the bad dogs that run loose in packs at night.”

  He fought back a smile. “Sounds like a job for Trent. Wish he could take my place.”

  Then I asked what I really wanted to know. “Do you get aroused during sex scenes?”

  He gave me a quizzical look. “No chance, even for an exhibitionist. It’s all very technical. You have to worry about hitting the mark, so to speak. A dozen people are watching over your shoulder. They keep spritzing you all over, so you look slick and sweaty. You have to worry about finding a way to kiss that makes you both look good on camera. No bent noses. You worry about angles, closeups. Charging up and down that flight of stairs was more fun, I swear.”

  “Even with Lexie?”

  “Especially with Lexie.” His voice took on a hard tone. “It’s a movie, Britt. It’s all illusion.”

  I didn’t even bother to check the office for messages. I stayed home alone, plucked Ground Zero from a stack of freshly rented Lance Westfell movies, and popped it in the VCR. I sat in my favorite chair, Billy Boots on my lap, and watched, imagining him making love to Lexie on the sand as the surf pounded and the full moon rose.

  He exuded heat, even on the small screen. Toward the end of the movie, Lance tenderly touched the cheek of a blonde actress.

  I know one thing, Kelly-Marie. The world is a more interesting place with you out there in it.

  I spit up a mouthful of the chocolate-cookie-dough ice cream I was devouring right out of the carton and hit the PAUSE button, REWIND, then PLAY. When he said it again, I threw a sofa pillow at the screen, turned off the phone, and went to bed.

  The city was quiet at 6 A.M. Sunday, the calm after Saturday night. The neighborhood was deserted and the warehouse was about to blow.

  Ziff and the crew were there, including Rad. I pointed him out to Lottie, who had come to watch. “Looks like a man whose urine specimen would glow in the dark,” she said.

  This was my first glimpse of Lance since his big beach scene with Lexie. Word on the set was it was so sizzling the producers had ordered a second sexual encounter written into the script. Lance looked as though the love scene had gotten out of hand. Lexie must have worked him over. Love bites seemed to cover his neck, and there was a bloody gash, closed by stitches, across his forehead.

  Ziff claimed responsibility. It wasn’t Lexie. The injuries, burns, and bruises on his throat, and the nasty head wound, were phony. Ziff had painted them on for today’s scene.

  Trent wore identical injuries and was dressed like Lance, except for padding beneath his fireproofed clothes. Makeup concealed his scar, and he wore a black wig styled like Lance’s hair.

  Though he looked nothing like himself in that get-up, Lottie was smitten. “T-types are hot,” she muttered. “Did I ever tell you about the stunt pilot I met in Mexico?”

  “T-types?”

  “That’s what psychologists call ‘em: T,” she said, lifting an eyebrow, “as in thrill. Risk takers, people who love excitement, who live on the edge. They’re a turn-on. They scale Mount Everest, they sky dive, drive race cars.”

  “Yeah, and some freebase, drag race, and rob banks.”

  “As American as apple pie,” she said. “Risk taking is the essence of America.”

  “Well, this stunt has been plotted, planned, and diagrammed like a military operation. Not much risk here.”

  They had already filmed take after take of Lance dashing through the warehouse, gunfire exchanged, bad guys in pursuit. Then they shot a scene with him and Lexie. Her character, Cassie, pulled up at the warehouse in a white Porsche. Tanned and lithe in a white dress, long hair flying,
she ran to greet him as he emerged, spritzed and sooty, from what would later appear on film as an inferno. He caught her wrist and they raced back to the car, but before making their getaway he bent her back over the hood in an embrace.

  “Don’t they have a home?” I muttered.

  “What?” Lottie asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Remember.” She cut her eyes at me. “It’s jist acting.

  “Hey!” Van Ness applauded. “Lance doing a little improvising there!”

  “Nice work,” Hodges called. “Not bad.” He looked pleased.

  Now it was time for the big blowup.

  Lance fought a last-ditch argument, insisting that he should do the run-through as the charges were detonated and fires ignited. He lost.

  Nobody was on his side.

  Nobody would know the difference, they said, shooting down Lance’s contention that the sequence would appear more realistic if he did the whole thing. Somehow his takes and Trent’s would magically merge in the final edit, thanks to the technical miracles of modern filmmaking. Plus, Trent was cocked, loaded, and ready to roll.

  He seemed almost abnormally calm. This was a one-take scene. Once the warehouse blew up, there would be no chance to try for a better take. Pressure was on, from the fire and police departments as well, to do it before crowds gathered and traffic interfered. A number of bystanders—the homeless, night workers, and others lured by word of mouth—had already gathered to watch.

  The series of explosions, controlled sequential detonations, had been orchestrated by Stan Fisher, the film’s pyrotechnics expert, who resembled a bespectacled accountant more than a mad bomber. The plans had been scrutinized and approved by the cops and a fire department consultant. This time, as Gardiner Bowles exchanged gunfire with the villains, charges would explode, dropping parts of the structure and igniting fires behind him as he sprinted through the heart of the building. Fisher would activate the sequence, using a panel box with remote switches.

  Explosive charges, packed into large steel funnels, were aimed like mortars at specific targets to make the explosions appear far bigger than they really were. The inverted funnels would spit the small explosive charges exactly where they were intended to go. The force would all travel in the direction of the funnel, with no blow-back, leaving few safety concerns.

  “All directed and controlled,” Fisher said. Camera angles would make the explosions appear closer to Trent’s heels than they actually were. After he safely cleared the door, a final big blast would bring down the front of the building and its heavy steel beams, Simultaneously, four fifty-five-gallon gasoline drums planted behind the walls would ignite. Each drum was a quarter full of gasoline and diesel fuel, then filled with cork that would flare into spectacular fireballs to create a truly magnificent inferno.

  The flying debris would be relatively harmless, cork and balsa wood, but fire, police, and security personnel stood by, armed with fire extinguishers. Minor mishaps were known to happen, a fireman told us. Once, during another movie shoot, a chunk of flaming cork hurtled across the street, high above the heads of firefighters and cops, landed on a fire truck, and burned a hole in the air-conditioning unit.

  “Lookit them,” Lottie muttered. “Lookit their eyes. These boys all love playing with fire. Boys and their toys.”

  True, from the cops to the firemen to the film crew, each wore the glittery-eyed look of the arsonist in the crowd. All except for Lance, who looked wistful, as though he really would have liked to do it himself.

  Fisher wore a hard hat and was perched high on a truck, squinting behind his glasses, the control panel before him. Cameras were positioned to shoot the disaster from every angle.

  I always regret seeing any old Miami building come down, another piece of history, lost forever. But this old warehouse was coming down in style.

  Three fire trucks, their crews, and a rescue vehicle stood by, as required by the city.

  They pushed us all back across the street, everybody but security and fire personnel and the directors and the cameramen mounted on their equipment. Even Lexie, who had disappeared into her trailer, stepped out to watch.

  The big moment arrived. “People, this is one time only!” Hodges shouted through a bullhorn. Both he and Rad wore firemen’s coats and helmets.

  Lance shook hands with Trent, who gave a jaunty wave to the crowd. He winked at us, strode inside, and found his mark.

  Lance and Niko trotted across the street to join the rest of us.

  “You were right about the sand fleas,” Lance muttered sotto voce into my ear.

  “Ready, Trent? Here we go!” Hodges cried. “Action! Camera!”

  Van Ness and Wendy, to our right, wore earphones, watching a monitor as Trent, alone in the building, began his run, shooting at unseen villains.

  Two small explosions behind him. Then nothing. “Hey!” Van Ness looked up. “Shoulda been another one. Son of a bitch! Must’ve been a dud. Dammit!”

  I looked over their shoulders. On the small screen, Trent kept running, kept shooting, but glanced sharply back to where that last charge should have detonated.

  He was visible now, through the large double doors. A darting silhouette, halfway there.

  A deafening explosion rocked the front of the building. The crowd gasped, oohing and ahing, as the street trembled. The front wall blew out and fell, the roof collapsed with a roar. A smattering of applause swept through the crowd.

  For a brief moment even I thought the spectacular effect was deliberate.

  Then I saw Hodges’s face, as he yanked off his helmet, screaming.

  “No! No!” howled Fisher, frozen atop the truck bed, staring in shock at the panel box in front of him.

  “My God!” Niko said.

  “This can’t be happening!” Lance said. Both men charged across the street. Shouting firefighters in gear were already running toward the warehouse. Two dragged a hose.

  Lottie took off down the street at a dead run. I knew exactly where she was going: to her car, for her cameras.

  As smoke cleared and the flames shifted, there was a glimpse of Trent on the monitor, pinned to the cement floor by a steel beam. His arms flailed.

  “Get him out! Get him out!” Van Ness bellowed.

  At that instant, the gasoline mixture exploded, along with all the other charges, spewing a fireball that enveloped Trent.

  A cameraman stationed close to the front of the building to film Trent’s exit was blown backward, staggered, and fell, engulfed in flames. Clothes on fire, he scrambled to his feet and ran screaming, straight into Lance’s arms. He and Niko wrestled him to the ground, beating out the flames with their bare hands.

  “No, Lance! No! No!” Van Ness and Wendy both shouted. “Get back! Get back!”

  The monitor behind them was blank, the remote camera dead.

  Flames leaped, soaring against the Sunday morning sky. Sirens screamed as more fire rescue units arrived. Lexie stood, mouth open in shock, on the front step of her trailer.

  Hands shaking I began taking notes.

  15

  Firefighters were unable to remove Trent’s body from the warehouse for more than four hours. First the fire had to be doused, then homicide detectives, fire inspectors, and arson investigators began to pick through the rubble.

  The “controlled” sequence of explosions had occurred in nearly reverse order, with the final blast detonating prematurely.

  “This can’t be, this can’t be,” Fisher mumbled, staring at the panel board, until the cops confiscated it as part of their investigation. “I wired it myself,” he told them. “It was perfect. I wired it myself.”

  Lance wept silently. Niko hugged him. I knew what they were thinking. The victim consumed by flames so fierce that he would have to be officially identified by dental records came this close to being Lance.

  Both he and Niko suffered minor burns on their hands from beating out the flames on the ca
meraman, who had been taken to the burn unit. He would survive. They had reached him before the fire did serious damage.

  Ziff blubbered like a baby, whimpering and hugging Lance and everybody else within reach.

  McDonald showed up to take charge of the death scene. Tight-lipped and serious, he took no static from Van Ness, who grumbled about the delay and its cost.

  “Frankly, I don’t give a damn about your budget or your shooting schedule,” McDonald told him. “Somebody’s dead. I’m in charge of this investigation, and it will be done right.”

  “It was an accident,” Van Ness said. “This business has a less than three percent injury rate. It was just our bad luck. Terribly unfortunate, of course, but accidents happen.”

  “I don’t know what it is at this point,” McDonald replied, “but I intend to find out.” Detectives took the film and wanted statements from everyone at the scene.

  Lexie actually asked whether this meant they would not be reshooting the scene between Lance and her. If not, she wanted to go back to her hotel.

  At headquarters, she pouted. She knew nothing about the stunt, but all the cops were eager to interview her. For the first time she didn’t totally ignore me. She glared, curling her lip at both Lance and me as we talked.

  When I began asking questions for my story, McDonald motioned me into his office.

  “Nice crowd you’re involved with here,” he said pointedly and settled into his desk chair. “All the producers care about is what kind of a delay this will cause, and all Lexie Duran wants to do is go play tennis. That poor son of a bitch. This movie and that crowd ain’t worth dying for.”

  I told him that Trent was sober, eager, and in good spirits when Lottie and I spoke with him shortly before the stunt.

  See any drugs used among the crew?”

  “No. You know Rad’s history. Do you anticipate some kind of criminal charge? Manslaughter, reckless endangerment, that kind of thing?”