I tried hard not to look down at his feet.
He handed me a beer and asked what he could do for me. We sat watching a ’52 Dodge with a green plastic screen like the brim of a card dealer’s hat above the windshield careen off the road as a tall man, strangely stooped, stepped out before it.
“Something about a murder, you said on the phone. I don’t see how I could possibly help you with something like that.”
I gave him the abstract: my case and Carl Hazelwood’s death in fifty words, dry as a science paper. Like notes you make about clients for your files. “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I said. “But I read Carl’s journal. Lot of it had to do with old films.”
“Science fiction, gangster, prison stories-that sort of thing?”
“How’d you know?’
“What else would it be?” He watched as the tall, stooped man entered a cave hidden among trees.” ’Home. I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal.’”
“Okay”
“Bride of the Monster.”
Onscreen, inside the cave, the tall, stooped man stood over a body laid out on a steel table.
“One of many he’ll inhabit,” Goldman said. “The bodies, recently dead, are imperfect and last but a short time. His supply is running out, his mission remains unfulfilled.”
That had a ring of familiarity about it.
“Actor’s name is Sammy Cash. No one knows much of anything about him, who he was. He came out of nowhere, starred in this string of movies-for a year or so there, he seemed to be in every cheap movie made-then he was gone.”
“Carl’s sister says films were realer than life to her brother, that he loved the bad ones best of all.”
“Good man. There really is an inverse engine at work here. The cheaper the films are, the more they tell you what the society’s really like, as opposed to what it claims for itself. Any particular names come up?”
I pulled out my notebook.
“Herschell Gordon Lewis, Larry Cohen, Basket Case, Spider Baby, The Incredibly Strange Creatures. ”
“Mr. Hazelwood had good taste. Or bad. Depending.” He laughed, and beer came out his nose. He wiped it, beer and whatever else, on his sleeve.
“Any idea who or what BR might be? It comes up on almost every page of his journal. An abbreviation, initials-”
“Just the two letters? No periods after?”
I nodded.
“Carl Hazelwood was murdered, you said?”
“You know something?”
“I might. You see the body?”
“Pictures.”
“Like this?” Goldman brought his arms over his head in an acute V, wrists turned outward.
I nodded.
“Certain circles, that’s a famous image. Couple of Web sites even have it as part of their logo. Branches with leaves breaking off. The leaves look like hands.”
“Okay, I’m lost.”
“You’re supposed to be. Know much about cult films?”
“Nothing.” Basic interview skills. Play dumb, admit to nothing. Interviewee’s words rush in to fill the void. “Tell me?”
“I can do better than that. Hold on.”
He stalked off to the corner of the room, rummaged in a stack of videocassettes there, then went to the desk for similar rifling. Came up with a CD. He ejected the resident cassette just as the tall, stooped man passed into a new body.
“This is all I have,” he told me, “all anyone has, as far as I know. Downloaded it from an Austrian Internet site.”
Long shots of suburban homes, tailored green lawns, billboards. Then suddenly, jarringly, the close-up of a man in agony. He stands or is propped against what may be a trellis, wooden lace work through which a white wall shows. His arms are pushed into a tight V above his head. There is a flurry of hands, four, then six, then eight, as they circle his, touch them, loop twine about wrists, tie them to the open weave. Left alone now, his hands droop to the sides. He smiles.
My host ejected the cassette as the screen filled with static.
“Sammy Cash again,” he said, “though most people don’t realize it. He’d been through a lot by then, he’d changed. This clip may be all that’s left-all I’ve ever seen, at any rate. But the film’s a legend. Any serious collector would trade his grandmother for a copy, throw in his firstborn.”
“Why?”
“You mean besides the fact that no one else has one.”
“Right.”
“Because it’s the most elusive movie ever made. There are still a few people around that claim to have seen it, but just as many insist no such film ever existed-that the whole thing’s a legend.”
He replaced the former cassette. A nude young woman looked in the mirror and saw there the tall, stooped man she’d previously been. She reached out to touch the mirror but, unaccustomed to her new body, reached too hard. The mirror broke.
“The Giving. Interesting enough in itself, from what we know. But infinitely more interesting as the last legendary film of a legendary director. You need another beer?”
I told him I was fine. Sipped from my can to demonstrate.
“The director is almost as elusive. Supposedly started out as a studio salesman, flogging film bookings to small theatres all over the Southwest. In the only interview he ever gave, he said he made the mistake one day of actually watching one of the things he was selling and knew he could do a lot better. He sold his Cadillac, sank the money he got into putting together a movie. Friends and neighbors and his barely covered girlfriend served as actors in that first one. He shot it over a weekend, and when on Monday, driving a borrowed car, he went back out on the road, that was the one he worked hardest to sell.
“Took studio folk a time to cotton to what was going on, even with bookings starting to fall off all through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. By then he’d put away enough money to make another movie. Four more actually. When studio folk finally caught up with him to fire him, he was coming off the plane from two weeks in Mexico with his girlfriend and actors he’d scrounged from local colleges and had those four new films in the can.
“He was like a lot of natural artists, told the same story over and over. Always a dance between this detective hero and his nemesis. At first the nemesis was nothing more than a cardboard character, a threat, a blank, a cipher. But as time went on, movie to movie, he began to become real. In some of the movies he had extraordinary powers. In others he was seen only as a shadow, or as a presence registered by others. Remember, the director was cranking these out in a week or less. Pouring them directly from his soul onto celluloid, as one critic put it.
“Then, suddenly, they stopped. A year went by. Finally-rumor or legend has it-his swan song: The Giving. This great mystery movie. There are half a dozen Web sites devoted to his work.”
“Can’t help but notice you’ve avoided the director’s name.”
“I haven’t. No one knows it. The movies were all brought out as ’A BR Film.’ No separate director’s credit. Just the two letters, no periods after.”
I stood, thanking him for his time.
“You want, I could skate around a bit on those Web sites, get e-mails off to my contacts, see what turns up.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
He tried drinking again from the empty can. “Done, then. I’ll be in touch.”
I almost stepped on the hairless cat who in lieu of giving up, had decided to outwait me and, when I moved, throw itself bodily in my path. As I tried to regain balance my hand went down hard on the couch. A floorboard near
