I looked at Chadney and his friends. And at the nitrogen ram itself. This was a new version of the old standby that has been used in Hollywood for years. You probably remember the great wire-pulls of history. Jack Palance plugging the guy inShane—and he’s picked up six feet and dumped in the mud. The guy getting shotgunned inBullitt. Ben Johnson being blown across the room out of his chair by McQueen inThe Getaway. Those are all wire-pull gags. The person is fitted with a harness under his clothes, and a wire is attached coming out of his back through a hole in his shirt. The camera is set up so you can’t see the wire, because the person’s body blocks it. On action, you have a simultaneous blood hit with a squib—that’s an explosive charge wired to blow out a packet of blood—and you have the wire-pull itself.
Now, it has to happen too fast for a manual yank of the wire. So you use a mechanical yanker. These days, you use the nitrogen ram, which looks like a big squat cylinder maybe four feet long with an attached bottle of compressed gas. You can adjust the force of the yank to compensate for the weight of the guy being pulled. And you can adjust the length of the throw—how many feet you want to pull the body. It’s a precision piece of high-pressure equipment.
But the stunt is still dangerous as hell. Which is why Al Chadney had the gleam in his eye. Chadney is like all stuntmen: He’s certifiably nuts. His best friends are guys like Glenn Wilder and Dick Ziker, guys who roll cars between takes to keep from getting bored. Stuntmen are so nuts that they do dangerous things for recreation. They’re all off on weekends skiing down glaciers or hang gliding or some damned thing. They love the risk of getting killed.
And Chadney certainly could get killed with the nitrogen ram. One little slip and the device would snap his back like a toothpick, and he’d be dead before he hit the ground. Or if he landed wrong, he’d snap his back on impact. And yet here he was, very excited over this chance to eighty-six himself.
He’d come close enough in the past. Chadney had broken his back in three places doing a ramp gag with a car. He’d been set on fire for real in another car doing an episode ofMannix. He crushed his leg when a Sherman tank hit it during a collision sequence forOnly the Brave. And he’d lost partial vision in one eye driving out of a third-floor window for some English production. But here he was, happy again.
The take was over, and he picked up again. Now, when he’s flying, you can do a straight front and an angled side, if you have something to cover the wire. If there’s empty space, you will see the cable, because it’s got to be fairly big. But if it’s against a background of buildings or something, you’ll never see it.
Tom Franklin wandered over. He said, “I’ll have three cameras on it.”
“Any speed?” Chadney asked, meaning slow motion.
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s hard to catch without speed,” Chadney said. This is a trick of stuntmen. They try to get the cameras set up so their stunts look good.
“How much speed?”
“Oh, ninety-six. Maybe one twenty-eight.”
“We might try one at ninety-six. I’ll see if I can get a high-speed Arri.”
“Get a Mark II,” Chadney said.
Franklin looked at Binyon. Binyon shrugged. “I know the high-speed Arris jam, but we may not be able to get a Mark II.”
I glanced at Perkins during all of this. He had wandered over and was paying a lot of attention to the conversation, and in particular, to Chadney. Chadney didn’t seem aware of it. He was caught up in his enthusiasm for the equipment. Then Mann wandered over, sniffling a little with his perpetual cold. Mann paid a lot of attention to Chadney too.
Then the DP called that he had his lighting ready, and Franklin left to go back to work, and the group more or less broke up.
I walked off with Perkins. “That interest you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because of this,” he said, and took a piece of paper from his pocket. It was a diagram of some sort. At first I didn’t recognize it, and then I saw it was a floor diagram of the Holiday Inn. A series of little boxes, with the names of everybody inside their rooms. Perkins only gave me a brief glimpse. Then he put it back in his pocket.
“I don’t understand.”
“The Holiday Inn is L-shaped,” Perkins said. “What does that suggest to you?”
I shrugged. I was honestly starting to feel a little sick of always being one or two steps behind him. Always in the dark.
“Many of the rooms have windows looking out on the corridor,” he said.
I still had no idea what he was talking about.
“Do you remember the call sheet for Tuesday? The day that was canceled because McDougall was dead?”
“No,” I said.
“Mr. Chadney was scheduled to do his nitrogen-ram stunt first thing in the morning.”
That was no help to me at all. I said so.
