Fifty Grand

He starts to shake.

“I got two million dollars for the last movie I made. I was third lead.”

“Two million dollars.”

“I didn’t see all of that, of course. Agent’s cut, manager’s cut, taxes. So really, when it all boils down-”

“And my father’s life was worth a measly fifty grand.”

In Havana fifty thousand could buy you out of a murder rap. You could become a general officer in the army for ten thousand. But here that was an insult.

“How many days did you work on that movie?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know, I-”

“Out with it.”

“Five-week shoot, I think.”

“So my father’s life was worth roughly one day’s work for you.”

“Well, you see, that’s what I was saying before-”

I click the hammer back on the 9mm to shut him up.

Let the silence hold you. I want you to sit with those details for a moment. A man’s life for a few hours’ work on a movie set.

Paco waves. “This thing is a fucking death trap,” he yells in Spanish.

“Yeah.”

“It’s cracking. Do you see it’s cracking?” he says.

“I see.”

Back to Jack. “Ok now. Tell me what happened that night.”

He closes his eyes, shakes his head. Sweat pouring from him.

“Speak.”

“I can’t,” he says.

“Why not?”

“I think if I tell you, you’ll kill me. You say you won’t kill me but I think you will.”

“Open your eyes. Look at me. Look at me!”

He opens his eyes, finds mine. I rid them of the red mist, the crazy, dark stuff from Santiago de Cuba, from New Mexico, from everywhere. I make them reveal what I am feeling right now. The calmness. The exhaustion.

“Can you see what I’m thinking? You gotta fucking trust me, I’m not going to kill you. Not now, not ever.”

“Ok,” he says. He fakes a grin, falters, blinks.

“Now speak, quick, before Paco comes.”

“It hadn’t been a good year. I was up for a Spirit Award, I didn’t get it. I’d never been nominated for anything major in my whole life, I never won anything in my life. But I got odds on that I would win that night. And they gave it to that bastard Jeremy Piven, who’s won everything. And then after that I lost a couple of big roles and then I was up for this movie Gunmetal and they said I had it in the bag and then those fuckers at Universal gave it to someone else.”

“The accident.”

“I lost the movie. But I didn’t go apeshit, not like in my twenties. Cool head. Paul was here. I flew to Vail on a charter. I went into town. Just for one drink. But they know me here and a couple of guys bought me drinks. I didn’t buy anything. I didn’t buy a drink the whole day. Nothing.”

“How many drinks?”

“I don’t know. Couple of beers. I wasn’t drunk drunk. I used to go to AA. I used to have a problem. This wasn’t a bender. This was just a few beers. And I don’t know, maybe it was the altitude or whatever, I’d been in L.A. all week.”

“What happened?”

“I’m driving home and I think I’m doing ok and I get to the hill and then there’s this dude alongside the car and clunk, you know, and I think I might have hit him but I’m not sure and I look in the rearview mirror and there’s nobody there, so I don’t know what to think. I stop and look back and there’s nobody there. I’m tired, and with the altitude and the beers and everything, I think I might have just hallucinated him or something.”

“Is everything ok?” Paco yells from barely twenty meters away.

“Interrogating,” I tell him.

I look at Jack. “Go on, fast,” I whisper.

“Ok, so I get home and just fucking go to bed. Next day, I don’t remember anything, just the car. So I dump the car at the garage and later that day they find the Me-the, uhm, your father, I mean, and I tell Paul and he just takes over. Private charter to L.A. Gets me into Promises and leaks it that I’ve been there for three days, in other words I never left L.A. Would never hold up if anybody really looked, but I’m not a big enough star for anybody to really look. Just another B-lister going into rehab. Nobody cared.”

Unattractive self-pity in those azure eyes, but not yet guilt, contrition, understanding.

“And then what happened?”

“Well, then nothing. I stayed at Promises for a couple of weeks and went back to Fairview to read scripts. Someone dropped out of Gunmetal and they offered it to me again and I took it. It was all good until that son of a bitch came snooping around.”

“What son of a bitch?”

“Briggs. Fucking Briggs. But again Paul took care of it. We paid him off. Fifty thousand to some cop charity, a couple of photo ops. Paul promised to use his boys as fucking extras in the next movie. Christ, it was all so pathetic. So fucking small change.”

I grimaced.

I’d like to think that that might have been the first of many payments. Briggs was smarter than that.

“How did you find us up here tonight?” I ask.

“Paul hit the panic button and Briggs traced the GPS in his car. Woke me up, got his deputies. He could have APB’d it, but he knew it was something to do with this. We had to keep it quiet.”

I nod, smile. “Ok. Good. You’ve been very good, Jack. Now, listen carefully. Paco is going to want to kill you. He thinks you’ll go to the police about this, but we have to convince him you won’t go to the police.”

“I won’t go to the police.”

Tears, trembling, hands together in prayer.

“I know you won’t go to the police, because if you do, I’ll make sure the press finds out that you killed my father and you and your manager conspired with the local police to cover it up. That’s manslaughter and conspiracy. You might not get a lot of time in jail, but you will go to jail and your career will be finished.”

“I’m not going to go to the police. I’m not,” he says desperately.

“My friend Paco is old-school. He’s from the jungle. They take an eye for an eye literally down there. We can’t let him know that you were the one driving the car. Understand? So don’t say anything, I’ll do the talking. Ok?”

“Ok.”

He looks at me with gratitude and fear. “Why are you doing this? You have every right to kill me. I killed your father.”

“Killing you won’t bring me one gram of comfort, I see that now. It’ll only make things worse. Much worse.”

Relief. More fucking tears. Probably real.

Paco almost beside us. My voice descends to whisper: “I’m going to stop him from killing you, but I want you to do something for me.”

“Anything. I owe you.”

“I want you to stop drinking. I want you to stop the bullshit. I want you to live an exemplary life. I want you to become engaged with the world. I want you to give a sizable portion of your income to charity. I want you to go to Africa. To India. I want you to improve the lot of Mexicans who work in your town. The invisibles. You can still act, that’s what you do, you can still make movies, but I want you to be a force for good.”

He nods. Really bawling now. “Of course. I will. I’m lucky. I’m lucky that you were the one, that it was you. I,