“Anything else?”
“Yes,” Appelbaum said. “No more releases from location. We’ll do all the press stuff on the murder from here.”
“You keep sayingmurder...”
There was a pause. “Are you sure Williams didn’t kill him?”
“There’s no reason to think he did. That’s all I can say right now.”
“I’m pretty sure he did it,” Appelbaum said, and took another bite of his sandwich.
* * *
I was supposed to meet the insurance people at three p.m., but I wasn’t happy about that. Somebody from the production office should have been there. It was a matter of making the right impression.
Movie insurance is a crazy business. The risks are high and the premiums are high and the desire to steal can be overpowering. And the insurance companies know it.
Here’s how it works: You’re a movie company. You’re insured for losses resulting from injury or accidents that affect the production’s progress. Normal insurance is a $10,000 deductible per incident. Something’s got to produce a bigger loss than that or the insurance company doesn’t pay.
Now, as a movie company, your costs are about $10,000 a day. Let’s say you have an accident one morning and lose a day. You don’t collect. The next morning, you have another accident and lose another day. You still don’t collect, because it’s per incident. That’s how it works.
But a movie is so complicated that you can, if you’re smart, make an accident work for you. Let’s say you’re hopelessly behind schedule. An actor has an accident, and you have to juggle the remaining schedule. It can be very complicated to decide what should be shot next, and then after that. Everything is improvised. Maybe you’d like to shoot a crowd scene, but the sets won’t be ready for a week. Or maybe you can’t get the extras unless you carry them all because ten days haven’t intervened since they last worked, which means you have to pay them for nine nonworking days and that might cost tens of thousands of dollars.
It isverycomplicated. So insurance companies want to look over the board—meaning the production schedule—themselves to see how they figure the changes should be made. They know a good UPM, a unit production manager, can cheat them blind. A good UPM can start with a tiny accident and make it worth two hundred grand in insurance losses. And somehow, in the process, he gets the picture back on schedule and on budget.
Anyway, it seemed like a bad idea for the publicist to be meeting the insurance auditors, and I was relieved when Jim Stone, the second assistant director, showed up to meet the plane. Stone is a graduate of VMI, and he has a military bearing that makes a solid, businesslike impression. He stands very straight and looks neat.
I asked him how things were back at the Holiday Inn.
“It’s a mess,” he said. “I hear the cops are talking about booking Clete.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, wondering where this rumor had started. First I hear it from Appelbaum and now Stone. “Clete may have gotten in a fight with McDougall, but then McDougall just went back to his room and passed out in his bathtub.”
“I’m just telling you what I heard.”
No doubt from Appelbaum, I thought, remembering our phone call. What did he call it, an “absolutely unprecedented event in film history”? I guess some rumors are just too good not to keep alive.
* * *
At four thirty, Perkins arrived from Chicago. I had never seen him before, although I’d certainly heard his name. Harlow Perkins was a legendary figure in the movie business—the most ruthless, cold, astute insurance investigator on the job. Everybody on a production had an immediate cardiac arrest whenever he showed up to check accounts. He was worse than the head of any studio, because while the studio heads screamed and yelled, Perkins would just stand there, in his three-piece suit and his Phi Beta Kappa key on his vest, andwatch. Then he would look at the books and he would ask a few questions, and somehow he would catch every error, every bit of sleight of hand, that a production was trying to get away with.
He never made notes, and according to rumor, he never smiled. It was said that he had a photographic memory and a computer brain—he could add a column of figures as fast as he could read them.
I recognized Perkins immediately as he came off the plane. He wore an English-cut suit and brown suede shoes, and he had a professorial air. His face was composed and watchful, almost detached.
I walked up to him. “Mr. Perkins? Harvey Jason, publicity onBloodrock.”
“How do you do,” Perkins said. No handshake. No smile. “I’m sorry you’ve had to wait here so long.”
I blinked. He walked off toward the baggage claim area. I went after him.
“How do you know I was here so long?”
“This is a desert area,” Perkins said, “but your shoes are extremely well polished. You’ve obviously had time to get your shoes polished, and that is what one does at airports when killing time. There are newsprint smudges on your hands. You probably spent some time reading the paper while you waited. But in any case, there have probably been all sorts of people arriving today, and somebody has to meet them. That’s traditionally the publicist’s job.”
A regular Sherlock Holmes, I thought.
“I wouldn’t exactly call it a brilliant deduction,” Perkins said, tugging at his shirt cuffs, pulling them down from the jacket sleeve. Up close, his suit was extremely well made, a lightweight wool that didn’t wrinkle. Or perhaps Perkins had stood up on the plane all the way from Chicago.
