J. Jance - A more perfect union

Kramer answered before Manny had a chance. "Here," he said.

That's when I hit the end of my rope and bounced into the fray. "Wait a minute," I said, turning to Wilson. "Is it going to make any difference to you if you look at him here or there?"

"None whatsoever," Wilson replied. "Either place is fine with me, although I think the dock over at Harbor Station is a little easier to work from."

"Then how about doing it there?" I suggested. "That way these people can get back to work."

Kramer started to object, but for a change Manny beat him to the punch and backed me up. "Good deal," he said to Harrison. "Take him down to Harbor Station and off-load him onto your dock. We'll meet you there in a couple of minutes."

"Okay." Harrison nodded. "You're the boss."

Kramer's face turned beet-red. With a little help from his friends, J. P. Beaumont had won that round fair and square. I motioned for Officer Jackson. "Do you see those two people standing there with Derrick Parker?" Derrick was standing in a tight little threesome with Sam Goldfarb and Cassie Young.

Officer Jackson looked where I pointed and nodded. "I see them," she said.

"Go tell them to start getting their people lined up. Now that the body's leaving, we'll be able to get back to work."

Merrilee Jackson flashed me a smile. "I'll be more than happy to do that," she said.

Jim Harrison finished securing the body to the deck and straightened up. Catching sight of me, he gave me a half-assed salute. Naturally, he was wearing surgical gloves.

In the good old days at homicide, we wore gloves only when dealing with bloated and decaying flesh, bodies like this one. We wear them more often now. They're considered essential equipment, right along with our badges and our guns.

I wondered suddenly if the good old days really had been that good, or if I was just an antique.

The real answer was probably a little of both.

By the time they resumed filming that afternoon, we had indeed lost the light. Goldfarb got in a huge shouting match with several members of his crew. As usual, the director carried the day. Over strenuous objections, Sam "The Movie Man" decreed they would reshoot the fight scene while somebody rewrote the script so the body could be found at night rather than in daylight. Meantime, techs scurried this way and that, bringing in more equipment, including a tractor-trailer rig containing a huge whispering generator to provide the juice to run the carbon arc lamps required for a night shoot.

Screwed up and incomprehensible as it may seem to a rank outsider, making a movie is a lot like living life. You work with little bits and pieces without ever getting a look at the big picture. It comes together gradually, in order or out of it, with no discernible pattern. No rhyme or reason, as my mother used to say.

I was doing my best to follow the story, but it wasn't easy. From scattered fragments, I had managed to determine that Death in Drydock was nothing more or less than an old-fashioned melodrama.

According to the story, Hannah Boyer, playing a somewhat less than virginal heroine, inherits a failing family business-the drydock company of the title. While attempting to turn the business back into a money-making proposition, she becomes romantically involved with a land-grabbing developer. The developer turns up dead in the water, and naturally the sweet young thing is a prime suspect. The lead detective on the case, played by Derrick Parker, is totally smitten once he encounters his gorgeous suspect.

The story itself was nothing short of ridiculous, and the idea of a cop falling for his suspect sounds like an overused cliche. It may be overused, but it does happen on occasion, even to the best of us. I should know.

The crew reshot the fight scene first, then they began working on the scene where make-believe cops pull the make-believe corpse out of the water. At least the water was real.

The retrieval scene was enough to make me want to turn in my technical advisor badge. Permanently. For one thing, Goldfarb couldn't be bothered with a boat. They dragged the body out of the water and dumped it directly onto the dock. For another, the dummy, fresh from the prop shop, had suffered none of the damage real corpses do. When they dropped it on the dock, the makeup was still totally in order, and all hair, fingers, and toes were still completely intact.

In addition, despite having seen a real body hook in action that very afternoon, Goldfarb insisted on using a sharply pointed metal hook to retrieve the body. All my pleas for realism fell on deaf ears. I tried to explain to Cassie Young that sharp hooks were used only for dragging the bottoms of rivers and lakes. I even offered to call Harbor Patrol and ask to borrow a real body hook to use in the scene. No dice. Cassie didn't pay any attention. She told me Goldfarb wanted a sharp point on the end of his body hook. That was what the script called for and that was the way it would be.

The reason Goldfarb wanted a sharp hook was soon obvious. Part of the retrieval scene included a special-effects sequence in which the sharp end of the hook is pulled free from the make-believe skin of the make-believe corpse. I took Cassie aside and attempted to explain that real human skin is amazingly tough, that body hooks catch on clothing, not on skin, but unrealistic or not, Goldfarb liked that ugly scene. He climbed down from the boom and crawled around on all fours to lovingly direct the cameras in capturing the sharp end of the hook as it came loose from the all too lifelike plastic skin.

For some reason, neither Cassie Young nor Hannah Boyer found any of this pretend gore the least bit distressing. So long as I live, I never will understand women.

In the end, the scene stayed as is. I didn't. I left the whole bunch of them to their own devices and went in search of Woody Carroll. If I had walked off the set completely, if I had pulled up my pants and gone home, there would have been hell to pay. I didn't need to have both Captain Powell and Mayor Dawson on my back. I was mad, but not that mad. Not yet.

After all, orders are orders. Instead, I hid out with Woody Carroll and some of the Lake Union Drydock employees. We settled down in the employee locker room and played several friendly hands of Crazy Eights on sickly green wooden lunchroom tables while Goldfarb went right on having his stupid cops do stupid things.

No matter what I did and no matter what Captain Powell wanted, the fictional Seattle cops in Death in Drydock were going to be a bunch of incredibly asinine jerks.

I stuck it out until almost midnight when Goldfarb finally called it a day. By then, even though I'd been off my feet for the last couple of hours, my heel was hurting like hell. The mobile canteen folks had brought dinner hours earlier, but it was that so-called nouvelle cuisine-the kind of food that looks real pretty on the plate but you're hungry again by the time you finish chewing the last bite. As I limped toward my Porsche parked five blocks away on Fairview Avenue East, I was craving a hamburger-a nice, greasy, juicy hamburger.

Derrick Parker hailed me from behind before I opened my car door. "Hey, Beau. Are you going straight home, or do you feel like stopping off for awhile?"

"What have you got in mind?" I answered. Parker waved away a limo driver who had been following, waiting for him to get in. "I guess you want a ride," I added.

Parker was already climbing into the car. He leaned back into the deep leather seat with a grateful sigh. "I've got to get away from these people. They're driving me crazy." As I started the car, he glanced slyly in my direction. "Let me guess," he said. "What you need is a chiliburger and a MacNaughton's from the Doghouse, right?"

I laughed. "Right, although I hadn't gotten to the chili part of it yet. If they run you out of the movies, Derrick, maybe you could get work as a mind reader."