Peter Corris - Comeback
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- Название:Comeback
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- Год:неизвестен
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Comeback: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация
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‘Shush, Soph, too loud. You’ll do yourself out of your commission.’
She grabbed my hand and held it in a sweaty grip. ‘You think I only care about money. I don’t. I love them. I love ’em all, ’specially poor Bobby.’
A young woman in jeans and a silk shirt stained by red wine and with the sleeves rolled up to reveal some interesting tattoos on her left wrist, came across and almost jostled Sophie aside. She was drunk.
‘Heard you talking about Bobby Forrest,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘What was he to you?’
‘Sorry, that’s my business. Who are you?’
‘I’m Chloe.’
‘Chloe what?’
‘Just Chloe, just poor Chloe. You shouldn’t talk about him, not worth talking about.’
Sophie bristled and Chloe looked ready to get physical when we were interrupted.
I’d been introduced to Earl Carlswell, the director, when I arrived. He came across now and spoke quietly.
‘Sophie’s not herself,’ he said. ‘She’s had some bad news. I wonder if you’d be kind enough to take her home?’
Sophie was still gripping my hand and trying to get her head onto my shoulder. Her makeup was smeared and her loose top threatened to slide down and reveal more of her than she’d have wanted. I helped her to her feet and she draped herself around me.
‘You’re nice,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a drink together.’
‘Let’s not,’ I said.
I scooped up her bag, slung it over her shoulder and guided her towards the nearest door. The cool night air and the breeze sobered her up enough to at least walk. The street was full of cars generated by the party and I’d had to park a couple of streets away. She was staggering by the time we reached the car and had to steady herself against it. She took a flask from her bag and had a swig.
‘You’ve had enough, Soph,’ I said.
‘Fuck you, or is that what you’ve got in mind?’
I opened the door and helped her in. She took another swig and slumped down in the seat. I got the car moving and realised I didn’t know her address.
‘I’ll take you home, Soph. What’s the address?’
She told me. It was Paddington, not far from her office. The traffic was heavy in Darling Street and the going was slow.
‘What’s the bad news?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Earl what’s-his-name said you’d had some bad news.’
‘That prick.’ She slurred the words. ‘Told me he was cutting Nicky’s scenes to the bone. Prick. Nicky’ll be devastated, prob’ly blame me. Prick. They never forgive you, actors. Bastards.’
‘Who was the drunk girl? I thought I recognised her from somewhere.’
‘Chloe? Nobody. Actor groupie. Bit of a nutter.’
She used the flask again and sat silently for the rest of the drive. Something was nagging at me as I navigated Paddington’s narrow streets and I nailed it down just as I drew up outside Sophie’s house. It was something she’d said in our interview before Bobby was killed. No, something she hadn’t said about his past . Breaking my old habit, I hadn’t made notes on the conversation and, in the drama of the events that followed, it had slipped my mind. I was sure I’d missed something then.
I helped her from the car to her door but she was too drunk to open it. I fished in her bag for the keys and unlocked the door. The house was single-storeyed which was a relief-I didn’t fancy carrying her upstairs. I considered trying to get some coffee into her and asking her again about the violent incident but I remembered that she’d been adamant about there being no dirty linen. She was too drunk anyway.
I helped her down the passage to her bedroom. Like her office, it was a mess, clothes lying around on the bed and on other surfaces. I stumbled over shoes as I eased her towards the bed and lowered her down. She was barely conscious. I took off her shoes, lifted her legs onto the bed and made her comfortable. Her eyes opened and she looked at me as if she’d never seen me before. Then her eyes closed and she snored.
I went through to the kitchen and filled a glass with water. I put it on the bedside table. I walked back towards the door and noticed the set of framed photographs along the wall. Men and women, actors; I recognised two-Bobby Forrest and Nicky. I looked at Bobby’s picture. It was a studio portrait presenting him in the best possible way. He looked handsome and wholesome, but was he? I thought about Jane Devereaux and Ray Frost and the feeling of failure that had been with me for weeks.
I went back to the bedroom. Sophie had rolled slightly so that she was on her side with one hand up close to her face, probably her natural sleeping position. At a guess she’d be asleep for at least a couple of hours before her bladder or her dry mouth woke her. I juggled her keys in my hand and knew what I had to do.
18
It was quicker to walk the couple of blocks to Sophie’s office than to drive there and waste time looking for a park. I tried a few of the keys on the ring until I found the right one. I unlocked the door. There’d been no alarm when Sophie had unlocked it before so it didn’t seem likely she’d have had one installed in the interim.
Her office was in the usual mess with scripts and magazines and books piled up everywhere. Sophie had been in the business a long time and, like me, would have kept hard-copy files on her clients. It was a difficult habit to break. There were three filing cabinets. I found the drawers containing the client files in the second cabinet. Chaotic though the office itself was, the files were in strict alphabetical order. It’s the only way.
Robert ‘Bobby’ Forrest’s file was thick, running to several bulging folders. He’d only been on Sophie’s books for a few years but work in the film business evidently generates a lot of paper-contracts, correspondence, financial statements, magazine and newspaper cuttings. I took the folders to the desk, cleared away the detritus, and began to work systematically through the material.
Most of it was easily set aside. It looked as though his career had started slowly, survived a few glitches and then settled into a pattern of steady improvement. Good stuff for his biographer if there was to be one for such a short life. There probably would be one if the lives of James Dean and Heath Ledger were any guide. I found what I was wondering about in a batch of correspondence and accompanying documents beginning almost four years ago and running for several months.
Bobby Forrest had got into a fight with Jason Clement, another actor on the set of a film. It was over a girl called Chloe Monkhurst. Clement had called Forrest a faggot and Bobby had punched him and continued to hit him once Clement was helpless. He had to be dragged away. At the time neither Forrest nor Clement was a big star, there were few people around and it wasn’t too difficult to hush the matter up-a payment here, a promise there.
But Clement’s injuries were far more serious than they thought. He needed several operations and these didn’t go smoothly-complications, infections, nerve damage. The upshot was that Clement would never walk properly again and his face was disfigured. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather , he was left with a weeping eye and he also experienced breathing problems. This brought the insurance companies for the production outfit into play along with personal liability cover for the actors. As the one who’d arranged Bobby’s liability insurance, Sophie was heavily involved in the assessments and arguments. In the end it came down to lawyers, threats of suits backwards and forwards and hefty payments to Clement.
The cover-up held as far as the public was concerned but some word got around among film people and casting agents steered clear of Bobby for a while. But he had a film in the can, one whose release was delayed for some reason, and when it was released he got good reviews and his star was on the rise. He got better and more varied parts, work in television and was on the brink of being a major figure when I met him.
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