powder, lipstick, those foolish huge sunglasses on her face. “It’s too ’orrible.”
“I’m standing on a street in Key West,” she said. “A marvelous live and let-live town. But, if you observe closely, I have to stand here observing different rules.”
“There’s been a murder.”
He walked forward again.
“Sure.” She walked with him. “If Jane Jones were involved in a murder, she could walk down the street without disguising herself as Miss Piggy. I can’t.” Crossing a sidestreet, the sun was warm on his face. “It’s a question of energies, really,” Moxie said. “Where do creative energies come from? If one has them, how does one best use them? When they wear down, how does one refurbish them? It’s a joyous problem. It’s also a responsibility, you see, all by itself. An extra responsibility. I guess, as Freddy says, a primary responsibility. And one just can’t be totally responsible for everything. Few chefs take out the garbage. The day just isn’t that long. No one’s energies are that great.”
Hand in hand, they walked through the long shadows of the palm trees on Whitehead Street.
After a while she dropped her hand.
“I know what your question is,” she said in a low voice. “Your question is: do different rules for creative people give them the right to commit murder?”
“Don’t cry,” Fletch said. “It will make gulleys in your face powder.”
“I did not murder Steve Peterman,” Moxie said. “It’s important that you believe me, Fletch.”
Fletch said, “I know.”
“Wow!” Moxie said. “What’s all this about?”
“Sunset.”
There were hundreds of people on the dock. Spaced to keep out of each other’s sounds, there was a rock band, a country band, a string ensemble. There was a juggler juggling oranges and an acrobatic team bouncing each other into the air. There was a man dressed as Charlie Chaplin doing the funny walk through the crowd. There was an earnest young man preaching The Word of The Lord and a more earnest young man in a brown shirt and swastika armband preaching racial discrimination, and a most earnest young man satirizing them both, exhorting the people to believe in canned peas. Each had an audience of listeners, watchers, cheerers, and jeerers.
Across the water, the big red sun was dropping slowly to the Gulf of Mexico.
The people milling around on the dock, ambling from group to group, looking at each other, listening to each other, taking pictures of each other, were of every sort extant. One hundred miles of Florida Keys hang from continental U.S.A., like an udder, and to the southernmost point drip the cream and the milk and the scum of the whole continent. There are the artists, the writers, the musicians, young and old, the arrived, the arriving, and the never-to-arrive. There are numbers of single people of all ages, sometimes in groups, the searchers who sometimes find. There are the American families, with children and without, the professional and the working class, the retired and the honeymooners. There are the drug victims and the drug smugglers, the filthy, mind blown, and the gold- bedecked, corrupt, corrupting despoilers of the human being.
“Wow,” said Moxie. “What a fashion show.”
The people there were dressed in tatters and tailor-made, suits and strings, rags and royal gems.
“You should talk,” Fletch said, grinning into her huge plastic glasses.
“So many people for a sunset.”
“Happens every night. Even cloudy nights.”
“What an event. Someone should sell tickets. Really. Think what you have to do to get this many people into a theater.”
After touring the crowd, listening to the music, watching the performers, Fletch and Moxie found an empty place on the edge of the dock and sat down. Their legs dangled over the water.
“What an outer reality,” Moxie said.
“Which reminds me,” Fletch said. “Simple enough question: who is the producer of
“Steve Peterman.”
“I thought you said he was executive producer, or something.”
“He is. Sort of. There is another producer, Talcott Cross. I never met him. His job is finished, for now. He worked at setting things up. Casting. Most of the location work. You know, hiring people.”
“Where is he?”
“Los Angeles, I suppose. I think he lives in Hollywood Hills. Steve intended to be the line-producer on this film. That is, stay with it during shooting, and all that.”
“So which of them hired Geoff McKensie and which hired Sy Koller?”
“Cross hired McKensie. Peterman fired him.”
“And Peterman hired Koller.”
“Right.”
“So Peterman is more powerful than Cross? I mean, one of the co-producers is more equal than the other?”
“Sure. Cross is more of an employee. Hired to do the production stuff Steve didn’t want to do, or didn’t have time to do.”
“Does Cross get a share of the profits?”
“I suppose so. But probably not as big a share as Steve… would have gotten.”
Down the dock, also sitting on the edge, a girl in cut-off jeans was staring at Moxie.
“What makes Steve Peterman as a producer more powerful than his co-producer, what’s-his-name Cross?”
“Talcott Cross. Everything in this business, Fletch, comes down to one word: the bank. Where the money comes from.”
“Okay. That’s my question. I thought a producer was someone who raises money for a film.”
“A producer does an awful lot more than that.”
The girl in cut-off blue jeans nudged the boy sitting next to her. She said something to him.
“But it was Steve Peterman who raised the money for this film.”
“Yes. From Jumping Cow Productions, Inc.”
“What’s that?”
“An independent film company. A company set up to invest in films. The world’s full of ’em.”
“Forgive me for never having heard of it. Has it made many films?”
“I don’t think so. I think it has some others in pre-production. Most likely it has. I don’t know, Fletch. It could be a bunch of dentists who have pooled their money to invest in movies. Jumping Cow Productions could be a subsidiary of International Telephone and Telegraph, for all I know.”
Half the big red sun had sizzled into the Gulf. A black, ancient-rigged sloop was sailing up the harbor toward them.
“Don’t you care who’s producing your film?” Up the dock-edge Moxie was causing widening interest among the group of young people. “I mean, if the source of the money is so all-fire important…”
Moxie sighed. “Steve Peterman was producing this film.”
The top of the sun bubbled on the horizon and was extinguished.
In the harbor, in front of the dock, the Sloop
And the people on the dock cheered.
Evening in Key West had been declared.
Fletch swung his feet onto the dock and stood up. “Let’s go home.”
“But, Fletch, after the sunset is better than before. That’s when the clouds pick up their colors.”
“There aren’t any clouds.”
She looked at the sky. “You’re right.”
The young people down the dock had stood up, too.
“Come on,” Fletch said. “We can walk slowly. Look back.” Moxie got to her feet. “You see the sun set in the ocean all the time anyway,” he said.
The girl in cut-offs was facing Moxie. “I know what you’re trying to do,” the girl said.
