“You just don’t get pee’d on by the right dogs.”
“You could be right. Just what can I do for you, Mr. Marlowe?”
“I want to see Mavis Weld.”
“She’s on the set. She’s in a picture that’s shooting.”
“Could I see her on the set for a minute?”
He looked doubtful. “What kind of pass did they give you?”
“Just a pass, I guess.” I held it out to him. He looked it over.
“Ballou sent you. He’s her agent. I guess we can manage. Stage 12. Want to go over there now?”
“If you have time.”
“I’m the unit publicity man. That’s what my time is for.” We walked along the tiled path towards the corners of two buildings. A concrete roadway went between them towards the back lot and the stages.
“You in Ballou’s office?” Wilson asked.
“Just came from there.”
“Quite an organization, I hear. I’ve thought of trying myself. There’s nothing in this but a lot of grief.”
We passed a couple of uniformed cops, then turned to a narrow alley between two stages. A red wigwag was swinging in the middle of the alley, a red light was on over a door marked 12, and a bell was ringing steadily above the red light. Wilson stopped beside the door. Another cop in a tilted-back chair nodded to him, and looked me over with that dead gray expression that grows on them like scum on a water tank.
The bell and the wigwag stopped and the red light cut off. Wilson pulled a heavy door open and I went past him. Inside was another door. Inside that what seemed after the sunlight to be pitch-darkness. Then I saw a concentration of lights in the far corner. The rest of the enormous sound stage seemed to be empty.
We went towards the lights. As we drew near the floor seemed to be covered with thick black cables. There were rows of folding chairs, a cluster of portable dressing rooms with names on the doors. We were wrong way on to the set and all I could see was the wooden backing and on either side a big screen. A couple of back-projection machines sizzled off to the side.
A voice shouted: “Roll ‘em.” A bell rang loudly. The two screens came alive with tossing waves. Another calmer voice said: “Watch your positions, please, we may have to end up matching this little vignette. All right, action.”
Wilson stopped dead and touched my arm. The voices of the actors came out of nowhere, neither loud nor distinct, an unimportant murmur with no meaning.
One of the screens suddenly went blank. The smooth voice, without change of tone, said: “Cut.”
The bell rang again and there was a general sound of movement. Wilson and I went on. He whispered in my ear: “If Ned Gammon doesn’t get this take before lunch, he’ll bust Torrance on the nose.”
“Oh. Torrance in this?” Dick Torrance at the time was a ranking star of the second grade, a not uncommon type of Hollywood actor that nobody really wants but a lot of people in the end have to take for lack of better.
“Care to run over the scene again, Dick?” the calm voice asked, as we came around the corner of the set and saw what it was—the deck of a pleasure yacht near the stern. There were two girls and three men in the scene. One of the men was middle-aged, in sport clothes, lounging in a deck chair. One wore whites and had red hair and looked like the yacht’s captain. The third was the amateur yachtsman, with the handsome cap, the blue jacket with gold buttons, the white shoes and slacks and the supercilious charm. This was Torrance. One of the girls was a dark beauty who had been younger; Susan Crawley. The other was Mavis Weld. She wore a wet white sharkskin swim suit, and had evidently just come aboard. A make-up man was spraying water on her face and arms and the edges of her blond hair.
Torrance hadn’t answered. He turned suddenly and stared at the camera. “You think I don’t know my lines?”
A gray-haired man in gray clothes came forward into the light from the shadowy background. He had hot black eyes, but there was no heat in his voice.
“Unless you changed them intentionally,” he said, his eyes steady on Torrance.
“It’s just possible that I’m not used to playing in front of a back projection screen that has a habit of running out of film only in the middle of a take.”
“That’s a fair complaint,” Ned Gammon said. “Trouble is he only has two hundred and twelve feet of film, and that’s my fault. If you could take the scene just a little faster—”
“Huh.” Torrance snorted. “If I could take it a little faster. Perhaps Miss Weld could be prevailed upon to climb aboard this yacht in rather less time than it would take to build the damn boat.”
Mavis Weld gave him a quick, contemptuous look. “Weld’s timing is just right,” Gammon said. “Her performance is just right too.”
Susan Crawley shrugged elegantly. “I had the impression she could speed it up a trifle, Ned. It’s good, but it could be better.”
“If it was any better, darling,” Mavis Weld told her smoothly, “somebody might call it acting. You wouldn’t want anything like that to happen in your picture, would you.”
Torrance laughed. Susan Crawley turned and glared at him. “What’s funny, Mister Thirteen?”
Torrance’s face settled into an icy mask. “The name again?” he almost hissed.
“Good heavens, you mean you didn’t know,” Susan Crawley said wonderingly. “They call you Mister Thirteen because any time you play a part it means twelve other guys have turned it down.”
“I see,” Torrance said coolly, then burst out laughing again. He turned to Ned Gammon. “Okay, Ned. Now
