David Morrell - NightScape

And Ric was gone.

I waited to hear about what happened at the meeting. No phone call. When I finally broke down and phoned him, an electronic-sounding voice told me that his number was no longer in service. It took me a moment to figure out that he must have moved to the condo in Malibu. So I phoned Linda to get the new number, and she awkwardly told me that Ric had ordered her to keep it a secret.

"Even from me?"

"Especially from you. Did you guys have an argument or something?"

"No."

"Well, he made it sound as if you had. He kept complaining about how you were always telling him what to do."

"Of all the…" I almost told Linda the truth-that Ric hadn't written the script she had sold but rather / had. Then I realized that she'd be conscience-bound to tell the studio. The deception would make the studio feel chilly about the script. After all, as far as they were concerned, an old guy couldn't possibly write a script that appealed to a young generation. They would reread the script with a new perspective, prejudiced by knowing the true identity of the author. The deal would fall through. I'd lose the biggest fee I'd ever been promised.

So I mumbled something about intending to talk with him and straighten out the problem. Then I hung up and cursed.

After I didn't hear from Ric for a week, it became obvious that Linda would long ago have forwarded to him the check for the rewrite on The Warlords. He'd had ample time to send me my money. He didn't intend to pay me.

That made me furious, partly because he'd betrayed me, partly because I didn't like being made to feel naive, and partly because I'm a professional. To me, it's a matter of honor that I get paid for what I write. Ric had violated one of my most basic rules.

My arrangement with him was finished. When I read about him in Daily Variety and Hollywood Reporter- about how Ballard was delighted with the rewrite and predicting that the script he had bought from Ric would be next year's smash hit, not to mention that Ric would win an Oscar for it -I was apoplectic. Ric was compared to Robert Towne and William Goldman, with the advantage that he was young and had a powerful understanding of today's generation. Ric had been hired for a half-million dollars to do another rewrite. Ric had promised that he would soon deliver another original script, for which he hinted that his agent would demand an enormous price. "Quality is always worth the cost," Ballard said. I wanted to vomit.

As I knew he would have to, Ric eventually came to see me. Again the car phone at the gate. Three weeks later. After dark. A night person, after all.

I made a pretense of reluctance, feigned being moved by his whining, and let him in. Even in the muted lights of my living room, he had the most perfect tan I had ever seen. His clothes were even more expensive and trendy. I hated him.

"You didn't send me my money for the rewrite on The Warlords."

"I'm sorry about that," Ric said. "That's part of the reason I'm here."

"To pay me?"

"To explain. My condo at Malibu. The owners demanded more money as a down payment. I couldn't give up the place. It's too fabulous. So I had to…Well, I knew you'd understand."

"But I don't."

"Mort, listen to me. I promise -as soon as the money comes through on the script we sold, I'll pay you everything I owe."

"You went to fifteen percent of the fee, to fifty percent, to one hundred percent. Do you think I work for nothing?"

"Mort, I can appreciate your feelings. But I was in a bind."

"You still are. I've been reading about you in the trade papers. You're getting a half-million for a rewrite on another script, and you're also promising a new original script. How are you going to manage all that?"

"Well, I tried to do it on my own. I handed Ballard the script I showed you when we first met."

"Jesus, no."

"He didn't like it."

"What a surprise."

"I had to cover my tracks and tell him it was something I'd been fooling with but that I realized it needed a lot of work. I told him I agreed with his opinion. From now on, I intended to stick to the tried and true – the sort of thing I'd sold him."

I shook my head.

"I guess you were right," Ric said. "Good ideas seem obvious after somebody's thought of them. But maybe I don't have what it takes to come up with them. I've been acting like a jerk."

"I couldn't agree more."

"So what do you say?" Ric offered his hand. "Let's let bygones be bygones. I screwed up, but I've learned from my mistake. I'm willing to give our partnership another try if you are."

I stared at his hand.

Suddenly beads of sweat burst from his brow. He lifted his hand and wiped the sweat.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Hot in here."

"Not really. Actually, I thought it was getting chilly."

"Feels stuffy."

"The beer I gave you. Maybe you drank it too fast."

"Maybe."

"You know, I've been thinking," I said.

The beer was drugged, of course. After the nausea wore off, giddiness set in, as it was supposed to. The drug, which I'd learned about years ago when I was working on a TV crime series, left its victim open to suggestion. It took me only ten minutes to convince him it was a great idea to do what I wanted. As I instructed, Ric giddily phoned Linda and told her that he was feeling stressed out and intended to go back down to Mexico. He told her he suddenly felt trapped by materialism. He needed a spiritual retreat. He might be away for as long as six months.

Linda was shocked. Listening to the speaker phone, I heard her demand to know how Ric intended to fulfill the contracts he'd signed. She said his voice was slurred and accused him of being drunk or high on something.

I picked up the phone, switched off the speaker, and interrupted to tell Linda that Ric was calling from my house and that we'd made up our differences, that he'd been pouring out his soul to me. He was drunk, yes, but what he had told her was no different than what he had told me when he was sober. He was leaving for Mexico tonight and might not be back for quite a while. How was he going to fulfill his contracts? No problem. Just because he was going on a retreat in Mexico, that didn't mean he wouldn't be writing. Honest work was what he thrived on. It was food for his soul.

By then, Ric was almost asleep. After I hung up, I roused him, made him sign two documents that I'd prepared, then made him tell me where he was living in Malibu. I put him in his car, drove over to his place, packed a couple of his suitcases, crammed them into the car, and set out for Mexico.

We got there shortly after dawn. He was somewhat conscious when we crossed the border at Tijuana, enough to be able to answer a few questions and to keep the Mexican immigration officer from becoming suspicious. After that, I drugged him again.

I drove until midafternoon, took a back road into the desert, gave him a final lethal amount of the drug, and dumped his body into a sinkhole. I drove back to Tijuana, left Ric's suitcases minus identification in an alley, left his Ferrari minus identification in another alley, the key in the ignition, and caught a bus back to Los Angeles. I was confident that neither the suitcases nor the car would ever be reported. I was also confident that by the time Ric's body was discovered, if ever, it would be in such bad shape that the Mexican authorities, with limited resources, wouldn't be able to identify it. Ric had once told me that he hadn't spoken to his parents in five years, so I knew they wouldn't wonder why he wasn't in touch with them. As far as his friends went, well, he didn't have any. He'd ditched them when he came into money. They wouldn't miss him.

For an old guy, I'm resilient. I'd kept up my energy, driven all night and most of the day. I finally got some sleep on the bus. Not shabby, although toward the end I felt as if something had broken in me and I doubt I'll ever be able to put in that much effort again. But I had to, you see. Ric was going to keep hounding me, enticing me, using me. And I was going to be too desperate to tell him to get lost. Because I knew that no matter how well I wrote, I would never be able to sell a script under my own name again.