Ed McBain: Puss in Boots

“Yes,” she said into the phone, “I understand that,” and rolled her eyes at Matthew, taking him into her exasperated confidence. “But we ordered the stock two weeks ago, and if we don’t have film, we can’t shoot, now can we? Wouldn’t you agree with that? That a person can’t load a camera with promises of delivery?” She rolled her eyes again. “No,” she said, “we’re not Twentieth Century-Fox, that’s true. Why? Is Twentieth Century-Fox one of your customers? Oh, I see, I didn’t think so. We’re just an itty-bitty little film company here in teensy-weensy Calusa, and all we’re shooting is a ninety-second commercial for a furniture store on the Trail, but you guaranteed delivery by the first, Mr. Peyser, and today is the third, and it’ll be Christmas before you know it, Mr. Peyser, so when are you going to deliver the fucking stock ?” She looked at Matthew, shrugged elaborately, and then said into the phone, “Oh, forgive me, I didn’t realize you were perhaps a Baptist minister. I thought you were perhaps a person accustomed to dealing with eccentric motion-picture types who occasionally pepper their speech with obscenities, especially when they are so fucking aggravated they could scream ! Just tell me when we’re going to get the stock, okay? Give me an exact date and an exact time.” She picked up a pencil and began writing. “Okay,” she said. “Thank you ever so much, Mr. Peyser, and it had better be here by then.” She slammed the receiver down onto the cradle, looked at Matthew, grinned angelically, and said, “So. What can I do for you ?”

“I have an appointment with Mr. Andrews,” Matthew said. “My name is Matthew Hope.”

“I’ll buzz him,” she said, and lifted the receiver and hit a button on the base of the phone. “Mike,” she said, “there’s a Mr. Hope here to see you.” She listened a moment, said, “Right,” and then put the receiver back on its cradle. “You can go right in,” she said. “It’s right through the door there, you go into this big room looks like a mausoleum. He’s in the projection booth.” The phone rang. She picked up the receiver, said “Anvil Studios,” and then waved him on toward the door at the far end of the reception area.

The room Matthew entered was perhaps forty feet wide by sixty feet long. He had never been inside a movie studio before, but this one couldn’t possibly be mistaken for anything but what it was. Hundreds of film cans were stacked on shelves lining the room, each can bound with a white adhesive strip upon which a title had been lettered with a black marker. Two huge angled consoles with buttons, switches, and dials on their faces sat before a glass-paneled room containing what Matthew guessed was sound equipment. Open boxes of cables were strewn everywhere on the floor. Aluminum carrying cases were stacked against the walls. Several cameras on wooden tripods stood in the underfoot debris like wading birds in shallow water. A large white screen dominated the far end of the room. The projection booth faced it. Matthew climbed a short flight of steps, knocked on the closed door, and then opened it.

A man in his early thirties was sitting behind the projector, rewinding a reel of film. The film came off the take-up reel, its leader flapping. He put his hand up to the still-moving reel, slowed it with his palm, removed the reel from the spindle, put it in a can, and only then turned to face Matthew.

“Mr. Andrews?” Matthew said.

“Yes.” He rose, extended his hand. “Pleasure to see you.”

His face was square, the cheekbones high, the nose a trifle too large. He had long curly red hair that sat on his head like a fright wig. He was wearing wrinkled lime green trousers, white high-topped sneakers with red stripes on them, a purple shirt with narrow yellow stripes, a tiny blue clip-on bow tie, and a pink polyester jacket flecked with random black tufts of fabric.

If he’d stepped out of a tiny automobile, he could have been a circus clown. If he’d stepped off a banana boat, he could have been an immigrant. But his eyes were the eyes of a robot programmed to kill. Pale blue. An eerie feeling of transparency about them, suggesting that if you looked hard enough you might see through them into the circuitry buried in the skull. The mouth, too, seemed etched onto the emotionless face, a thin line that attempted a smile as he shook hands with Matthew — but the smile was programmed, and it came over as false.

“It’s an honor to meet one of Calusa’s most illustrious criminal lawyers,” he said. The words may have been spontaneous, but they sounded rehearsed. Moreover, Matthew was not one of Calusa’s most illustrious lawyers, criminal or otherwise.

“It’s good of you to make time for me,” Matthew said. “I know you must be busy.”

“I’m usually here from seven in the morning till ten at night,” Andrews said, and sighed heavily. “It’s a long day, believe me, but hard work never killed anyone. I sometimes think my partner and I inadvertently chose the correct name for our little enterprise. Anvil Studios. In that we keep hammering away against steely resistance in an attempt to forge some small appreciation of quality here in the boondocks.”

The thin false smile again.

Matthew was sure he’d spoken those very same words a thousand times before. Hit the robot’s hard work button, and out came the anvil metaphor.

“Actually,” Andrews said, “the name is an acronym of both our surnames. My partner’s name is Peter Villiers, he’s of French ancestry. We put together the first two letters of my name and the first three of his, and came up with Anvil. It’s fortuitous that our names aren’t Sheen and Itkin.”

Again the narrow smile.

Again, the feeling that he’d told this same little anecdote many times before.

“Mr. Andrews,” Matthew said, “I have the sheriff’s report made on the night Prudence Markham was murdered—”

“Terrible shame,” Andrews said. “An extremely talented person, hard to come by here in Crackerville, USA. Cultural pretensions abound in Calusa, Florida, but everyone here spells culture with a K, as in cat. A wonderful person, Prue. I’ll miss her.”

“Did the police contact you that night?” Matthew asked. “There were no reports in the file—”

“Well, I wasn’t here,” Andrews said at once.

“You weren’t working your usual long hours that day, is that it?”

“My usual... ? Oh. Seven to ten. No. At the time of the murder, in fact, I was in bed with a little bitch from Sarasota.”

The words irritated. More so in that they were accompanied by the android smile. There was about Andrews an air of self-importance entirely out of keeping with the fact that he was a small-time filmmaker in a city not particularly noted for such endeavor. One would have expected such a bloated attitude from a production chief in Los Angeles, though even there it might not have been tolerated. To find such an ego here in Calusa was unimaginable. To find it in someone so young —

“Then they didn’t telephone you?” Matthew said. “To ask you to come out here?”

“No, they didn’t. The building was locked and the burglar alarm on. The killer couldn’t possibly have been hiding inside. Therefore, why the need to drag me out of bed? Elementary, my dear Watson,” he said, and smiled again.

“Had you ever worked with Mrs. Markham?” Matthew asked. “You said she was extremely talented—”

“An exception here in Calusa. Extremely talented. I should know. I’m a shrewd judge of talent and a man of little patience for dilletantism.”

“Then you did work with her.”

“On several films, yes. We did one, oh, it must have been six months ago, I would imagine... yes, in June sometime... at the beach on Sabal Key, an educational film for showing in schools, an attempt to introduce adolescent shit-kickers to the beauties of the omnipresent and largely ignored natural splendor surrounding them here in Florida.”