Walter Williams: The Picture Business

“A few things! Like what?”

“Well,” Helio said, “hke the plot.”

Paulie was outraged. “The plot? ”

“Those action scenes,” Heho said reasonably, “they’re the heart of your movie. You don’t have to change a thing there. All you got to do is change who the characters are and what they do.”

“I spent a year on this thing!” Paulie said. “A year! I’m not gonna change it for some dumbshit reason like this!”

Heho’s lips were pressed into a thin line. “It’s not dumbshit. Prison is not dumbshit.”

“This is my movie!” Paulie shouted. “I sweated over every frame of it!” He pointed at Helio. “You are not going to fuck with it! You are not going to take my movie away from me!”

They glared at each other for a long, furious moment, and then Helio shrugged. “Just think about it, Paulie,” he said.

“I don’t gotta think about nothing!” Paulie said.

Helio patted Paulie’s arm again. “Just think about it for the weekend, Paulie. We’ll talk about it next week, when we’ve had a chance to calm down.”

“Yeah,” Raimundo said. “Let’s join the ladies.”

They began to shuffle toward the door. “Good movie, Paulie,” said Leo as they left the office. “Real good movie.”

“What was that all about?” Gloria asked, when she had a chance to get Paulie alone. “Jesus, you were screaming at each other.”

“Fucking critics,” Paulie said.

“What’s their problem?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

The party was sort of okay. Helio and his crew seemed relaxed, and they had some fun. After the Brazilians had gone, while Gloria took off her blonde wig and brushed out her hair, Paulie told Gloria what the argument was about. She looked at him in the bathroom mirror and frowned.

“This is a real problem, isn’t it?” she said.

Paulie shook his head. “It’ll blow over.”

“No. Seriously. You broke a rule.”

“Gloria,” Paulie said, “it’s a movie. It has nothing to do with anything .”

“You should get this straightened out with Helio. I want you to call him tomorrow.”

“I dunno,” Paulie said. “It’s really not important.”

Gloria put her brush down. “Paulie,” she said. “Listen to me. I want you to call Helio and tell him you’ll fix it.”

“Yeah,” he finally conceded. “Okay. I’ll do it if you insist.”

So next day he called Helio, and he said he was willing to make a few changes. Not the story, not anything crucial to the movie or anything, but he was willing to change how the characters looked, or whether they were Latin or not, or their names. He was willing to go that far.

Helio listened and seemed to agree.

As Helio hung up the phone, Raimundo said, “We got a problem here, don’t we?”

“Yeah,” Helio said.

“A tough problem.”

Helio sighed. “Tough,” he said, “yeah.”

“Who’s going to solve it for us?” Raimundo asked.

Helio wrinkled up his face. “I don’t know,” he said. “I gotta think.” When he got home he called Little Joe in Providence, and then contacted the guy in Boston that Little Joe recommended.

Nice fuchsia, Al thought as he looked at Paulie’s former home. He had dropped the body in a place on Saddle Peak that Helio had told him about, and now he returned to the scene to deal with the mediatron. Because he didn’t know much about electronics, and wasn’t sure he could erase its contents properly, he’d brought a crowbar with him just to make sure.

He unplugged the mediatron, unscrewed the console panels, and smashed everything inside. Then he rolled the wrecked machine out into the driveway so that he could push it up into the truck he’d rented for the purpose of carrying it to a scrapyard Helio had told him about, where it would be crushed into a small metal-and-plastic cube.

He lowered the truck’s ramp to the pavement, and maneuvered the mediatron toward it. It was at that moment that a Porsche purred up into the driveway and a woman got out. Al walked toward her.

Al was supposed to clip Paulie’s girlfriend, too, but all he knew about her was that her name was Gloria and she was a blonde. Nobody in Heho’s crew knew Gloria’s last name, or where she worked, or where she lived, and Al hadn’t been able to find her phone number written down anywhere. So Helio had just told him to hang around until Gloria showed up, and then do the second half of his job.

The woman in the Porsche was a redhead. That made Al hesitate. She was also dressed hke a businesswoman, in a suit, and not like a person that someone hke Pauhe was likely to have for a girlfriend.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

The woman seemed puzzled. “Is Pauhe in?” she asked.

“He’s gone out for a little while,” Al said. “Are you Gloria?”

The woman was looking at the smashed mediatron. She looked rapidly at Al, then back at the mediatron again.

“No,” she said. “I’m not. My name is, ah, Miss Gross.” She licked her lips. “Pauhe said he wanted to talk about, ah, insurance. For his electronics.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Al said.

“Well.” The woman turned and walked quickly back to her car. “Tell him I came by, okay?”

“I’ll do that,” Al said.

The woman drove away fast as if she had another appointment.

Al pushed the mediatron up into the truck, then strolled back into the house. It was nice, he thought, full of light. And he liked the smell of honeysuckle wafting into the house from the deck out back.

Wonder who owns it? he thought. Since he was waiting for Gloria anyway, maybe he should start making himself at home.

Other than the insurance lady, nobody ever came by looking for Paulie.

That’s how popular Paulie was.