Warren Murphy: Fade to Black

"You're Quintly Tortilli!" he gasped.

"That's the name on my Oscar," the customer snapped urgently. He waved an angry hand at the bagel. "Give it here, asshole."

Shawn hesitated. He knew of Quintly Tortilli all too well. The man was a hero to every failed filmmaker. Although he was now one of Hollywood's most famous directors, only a few short years before, Tortilli had been employed as an usher in a theater. This in order to be closer to the films he loved so much.

According to all the bios, Quintly devoured films. When he'd made the transition into movies, the young director had borrowed heavily from everyone and everything. Sometimes he regurgitated whole scenes and plots from obscure B movies in his own loud, ultraviolent films. In any other industry this would be seen for what it was: stealing. In Hollywood it was "homage." Quintly Tortilli was a true Hollywood success story. And now he was displaying some of his famous impatience at the canteen truck of Shawn Allen Morris.

As Tortilli flapped an angry hand, Shawn hesitated. He held the precious bagel away from his customer.

Shawn had tried to break into the motion picture business in every legitimate way imaginable. He had nothing more to lose. As Quintly Tortilli waited testily beside the truck, Shawn raised his hand. Fingers uncurling, he allowed the bagel to plop to the truck's floor. For good measure, he ground a heel into the smooshy cream cheese.

Tortilli's already demented eyes widened. "What the fuck did you do that for!" he screamed.

Shawn's voice didn't waver. "I want a job in film," he said softly.

"What?" Tortilli snapped, his knotted face twisting into a caricature of human anger. "Gimme my fuckin' bagel!"

"A job for a bagel," Shawn insisted. "Quid pro quo."

"Quasimodo what?" Tortilli ranted. "What the fuck is this? All I want's a fuckin' bagel, for fuck's sake."

"And I want a job in film," Shawn replied calmly. "Get me one and I'll give you your bagel." Tortilli's voice had been growing in volume and pitch. By now it was a woman's whine combined with a high-pitched shriek.

"What the fuck!"

"That's my offer. Take it or leave it." Shawn crossed his arms firmly over his chest. For added emphasis, he made a show of grinding his foot further into the flattened bagel.

Tortilli fumed for a moment. Finally, his twisted alien's face split apart at a point between his curled, jutting nose and his witch's chin. "You start tomorrow," he hissed. "Now give me my fucking bagel!"

That was that. In two days Shawn was two states up the coast, sitting behind a desk in the Seattle offices of fledgling Cabbagehead Productions.

Cabbagehead had been established by a group of wealthy backers who were hoping to break into the independent end of the film industry. The company was supposed to produce the types of counterculture art movies that invariably got good word of mouth at Academy Awards time.

The motivation of Cabbagehead's anonymous benefactors didn't matter to Shawn. He was home at last. In the motion picture industry. It didn't matter that in his job he had to act as location coordinator, producer, wrangler, set designer, assistant editor, occasional gaffer and-due to his experience on his canteen truck-caterer. Thanks to Quintly Tortilli's lust for instant bagel gratification, he was finally where he belonged.

In the eight months he'd spent in the dreary Pacific Northwest, Shawn had overseen the production of thirty-eight motion pictures. Most were barely above the amateurish level of college films. But that didn't matter because no one here was into big budget Hollywood glitz. They were making "serious" films. All of the wretches who drifted in and out of the Cabbagehead offices knew it was only a matter of time before a dozen gold statuettes lined the empty shelf above Shawn Allen Morris's cheap lobby desk.

During his eight months in that tawdry office, only two people had ever seemed unimpressed by all they were trying to accomplish there. The first was the mailman. That bourgeois bastard always had a smirk on his face whenever delivering the bizarrely wrapped and addressed packages sent to Cabbagehead from would-be filmmakers. The second undazzled visitor walked through the front door one afternoon as Shawn was reading a screenplay entitled Hate Like Me, written by a lesbian Black Panther California university professor named Tashwanda Z.

Cabbagehead couldn't afford secretaries, so Shawn was sitting at the tiny desk in the main waiting room when the man entered. Shawn could tell straight off that he was a prole. Probably thought Back to the Future was great cinema.

The man looked to be somewhere in his thirties. He wore a white T-shirt and a pair of tan chinos. His leather loafers seemed to glide across the floor without touching it. Unlike the bemused expression of the mailman, this bumpkin's dark face was somber. Almost cruel.

Although possessed of a slight build himself, Shawn was not particularly intimidated by the thin young man as he crossed the lobby to his desk. Shawn didn't even put down the script he was reading when the man spoke.

"You in charge?"

Shawn sighed with his entire body. Delicate hands closed the script. "I am President Shawn Allen Morris," the Cabbagehead executive replied disdainfully. "And you are?"

"Remo Valenti, MPAA."

Shawn snorted. "In that getup? Yeah, right. Look, if you're here to pitch a script, forget it. I've got four films in production even as we speak, two more green-lighted for next week that I haven't even read yet and, to top it all off, I just found out one of my shit-head lead actors got called for jury duty and was too stupid to weasel out of it, so my people have to recast. So unless you're good with a bullwhip and a chainsaw, there's the door."

Testily, Shawn reached for another script. He was dismayed to find a hand pressed on the cover. The hand was attached to the thickest wrist Shawn had ever seen. The Cabbagehead president looked up into the dark eyes of his visitor. They were like tiny manhole covers, opened into utter blackness.

"Listen, Sam Goldwyn," Remo said, "I don't want to be here-you don't want me here. Why don't you just tell me what I want to know and I won't slap you with an NC-17."

"You don't even know what NC-17 means." Shawn smirked.

It was Remo's turn to smile. "Sure, I do," he said. "It means No Crap or I Break 17 Bones. First one's a freebie."

The hand flashed by faster than a single movie frame.

Shawn felt a horrible, crunching pain at the ball of his right thumb. The brittle crack of a lone metacarpal filled his horrified ears. He gasped in pain.

As Shawn pulled his broken hand from his desktop, Remo waggled a cautionary finger.

"Now tell the truth," he warned, "or you'll get an NC-17 and a PG-13. Give me the who and where on whoever's killing people to make these junk movies of yours sell."

"That's why you broke my freaking thumb?" Shawn demanded. He stuffed the injured digit under his armpit. "I already told the cops a million times. I don't know what the hell's going on. At first I thought it was just a lucky coincidence, but now I think maybe someone's out to sabotage us. And it's really too bad," Shawn added. "When I heard about that first body I thought ...whoa! My ship's come in. The press was fantastic back then. Rode the crest of that wave straight into Telluride. But it's gotten crazy lately. That Anderson thing was too much. One body, maybe two helps a movie. But four? That's overkill."

Remo's eyes were flat. "I'll show you overkill in a minute," he promised. "For now, there has to be some kind of connection."

Shawn tried to shrug. It was hard to do with his thumb jammed under his arm. "That's what I thought," he agreed. He quickly added, "Not that Crating Sally wasn't an Oscar contender even before that torso showed up in the orange crate. But the press coverage didn't hurt to keep us fresh in the minds of voters. We only missed that one by a couple of votes," he added bitterly.