Read Online Murder on Location by Howard Engel - Free Book Online Page B

spreading stain. Ma made Nescafé and served it in her silver tea-service, which usually lives under a tent of Saranwrap. Pa and I lit up cigars. I like a good cigar after a big meal although not well enough to keep a supply of my own. Linda looked a little happier. She took out a package of Egyptian cigarettes and offered one to my mother, who I’m sure rejected it thinking that it contained either opium or marijuana. The night had been heady enough as it was.
    We retired downstairs again to watch television. After an hour of this, I drove Linda back to her brother Wilfred’s house, and thanked her for a very unusual evening.

SIX
    â€œMy old man was a stunt man. He could do anythin’ with a horse or on a horse. In his heyday, if they couldn’t get Bud Sayre to do the shot, they changed the shot. I had a stunt man’s point of view on Hollywood from the cradle.” Jim Sayre was leaning back in his chair in a dark corner of the roof-top bar at the Colonel John Butler. For about the last half hour he’d been telling me about his early days in the movies. I was slowly sipping Jack Daniels he’d insisted on buying me. He was on his third since I’d arrived. To hear him talk, you could see that he was still in love with the movies. His stories were lightning fast and I often missed the point because some name slipped through my fingers. He liked stories about his father.
    â€œâ€¦ Hell, he pulled all the leather there was to pull, and she nearly throwed him. When they got back to the corral he found a burr as big as your fist under the blanket!” He told me that he had played in a few westerns before trying his hand at doctoring bad scripts. “I showed them how they could make a few changes and turn two scripts into four. Same dialogue, practically, same actors and locations. Hell, I don’t know what they thought ofmy writin’, but they sure as hell liked my economics …” He was wearing a checkered Viyella shirt with a string tie in a tooled silver clasp. His head was large, senatorial, with sparse white thatch on top and heavy glacier tracks down both sides of his pug nose. The nose, and the cowlick, helped touch everything he said with humorous irony.
    The waiter hovered near. “Excuse me, Mr. Sayre. I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’ve got a collection of autograph books back at the bar, and I wonder if—I don’t mean now—but if sometime you could see your way clear to …”
    â€œSure thing, Walter. Just hold on to them until I get a spare minute.” Walter agreed with a nod, but was prevented from turning by one of Sayre’s big hands on Walter’s near elbow. “Tell me, Walter, what’s that all about?” Sayre tipped his head in the direction of a clutch of photographers at the door.
    â€œThem. They’ll be here every night you’re here, I guess. You want I should get them to shove off?”
    â€œNo, Walter. Won’t be necessary. We all have to make a livin’. Some of us are horses and some of us are sparrows.” Sayre ordered two more drinks like he was ordering a seven-course dinner. His precise instructions were relayed to the bartender, who shot a glance under his eyebrows in our direction. Jim had been going on about Fields and Chaplin and about how he’d been called an “oh-toor” by the French film critics. I never caught up with that one. The waiter poured my old drink into mynew one without comment. For a minute Sayre and I sipped quietly. From where I was sitting, I could see the outline of the nearest of the tourist towers overlooking the falls. There were several of them, but this was the Pagoda, and I looked at it in the rising mist with new meaning.
    â€œDamn it, Ben, look at the way that man’s pawin’ that poor girl. You’d think he’d get her home first.” I shifted to see what he was looking at. The man was probably a branch sales