“Don’t you like me?”
“Sally, I think you’re a wonderful girl.”
“Everybody else likes me.”
“Sally...”
She stopped and put her hands on her hips. “You’re as bad as Arthur,” she said. “All talk and no play. He kept talking about it, but he would never do anything.” And then she giggled. “For a while.”
“What happened with you and Art?”
She giggled again. “I used to meet him sometimes in his room, when Charlie was away.”
“Very often?”
“Sometimes,” she said, and giggled some more. “But he wasn’t very nice,” she said, turning sober at the recollection. “Clete is nicer.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And Billy is nice too.”
That was the cameraman. I found myself wondering who else she thought was nice, and probably she would have told me except that she suddenly turned pale, and said, “I feel sick,” and got up and ran out of the room.
The waitress came back and collected my plates. “You want coffee, or what?” she asked.
I was watching Sally run for the bathroom. “Just a check,” I said.
“She’s crazy, that one,” the waitress said, and walked away.
So there I was, sitting alone in the dining room again, with Sally come and gone, and my pants wet from the spilled drink, and I had no idea what to do next. I thought maybe I should mention it to Perkins, at least the part about Sally and McDougall, but I figured maybe he already knew. That film clip we saw certainly suggested that something was going on between them. Unless McDougall was just horsing around with her on the set, maybe trying to screw up Clete’s concentration.
I didn’t know what to do, but I wasn’t sleepy anymore. I was all jangly and tense. So I went next door to the bar to have another drink or two.
* * *
By now it was eleven at night, and the bar was pretty deserted. Most of the crew were in bed—there was a six-thirty call for tomorrow. I sat at the bar and had another double Scotch from Ben.
“You look tired,” Ben said.
“Iamtired, Ben.”
“Boy, I tell you,” he said, “this bunch is all strange.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean your people—every one of them stranger than the next. Al wasn’t drinking tonight. He was acting like a priest or something. Why is that?”
“He has a difficult stunt tomorrow.”
“That right? What’s he doing?”
“He’s getting yanked on a wire,” I started to explain, and then gave up. “It’s dangerous.”
“Is it something like walking a tightrope?”
“Something like that.”
I was sipping the Scotch when a girl came into the bar. For a moment I thought it was Sally, but it was Al’s girlfriend, whose name I didn’t know. But I had seen her around. She was one of those blonds who have very good skin, good complexion, and are a little overweight but firm. Like girls that ski. The athletic sort.
