Story Excerpts
Brian Westcott tapped a laptop screen with the tip of his pencil. “Eric, this stuff is never going to make it all the way here from Hungary by surface mail in six weeks.”
As Westcott rotated his body slightly for the next take, a young woman dashed forward and gently pulled a wrinkle out of his shirtsleeve. “The hair’s coming down again,” she told him, “but I can’t do anything with it between takes. Maybe as soon as we start shooting again you could swish it back . . .”
“Tracy.” Like distant thunder warning of an approaching storm, the name rumbled forth from a heavily built man perched on a wooden case in the shadows. “In this outfit, guys don’t swish anything. How about telling him to shove it back?”
Another young woman, wearing a headphone over one ear, motioned from behind a portable console. “Sound check, Mr. Stout?”
Unfazed by the tacky phrase that Stout uttered in response, she nodded approval, not to him but to the big man in the shadows. Then she played back Westcott’s last remark to enable his partner to pick up the rhythm as he resumed the conversation.
Meanwhile the camera operator had shifted his angle of view and confirmed that the lighting was still right. Shooting resumed.
“So,” replied Eric Stout with a cynical shrug, “they’ll just have to wait a little longer. People who buy stuff online know perfectly well that ‘allow four to six weeks for delivery’ is just a bucket of hogwash.”
The action stopped again. The director squirmed and swore. “This nonsense of shooting dialogue with a single camera is one medieval drag,” he groused. “Where in blazes is Simon? Ring his room at the hotel again, Reno.”
“I just did. He’s not picking up.”
“Sergeant Dollinger, you have a call on line one from Patrolwoman Cameron.” Dollinger surmised, from the subdued tone in which Orva Wolcott, the constitutionally boisterous receptionist, delivered this message, that either a member of the public or a police officer of rank higher than sergeant was within earshot of her cubicle outside his office. He picked up the phone.
“Hey, Wendy.”
“Hey, Sarge. How you doing?”
“Fatter and balder than ever. What have you got?”
“Probable homicide in an empty hotel down on Fiske, close to the river. Guy fell forty, fifty feet a little after ten this morning.”
“Fell?”
“Descended, dropped, plunged . . .”
“From the roof, a window . . . ?”
“No, indoors. From some scaffolding. They’re remodeling the building.”
“Construction worker?”
“Video cameraman. Simon Lathendal, age forty-two.”
“Witnesses?”
“Eight of them. That’s the problem.”
“Why is that a problem?”
“Because the coroner’s investigator says Lathendal’s been dead for at least four hours.”
Dollinger looked at the clock on the wall. “Since early this morning.”
“Sixish or before.”
“And he just now fell?”
“Maybe twenty-five minutes ago.”
“Who are these witnesses?”
“Part of a TV crew. They’ve got the whole bloody spectacle recorded in high-definition. Which I’ve watched three times now.”
“Let me get this straight, Wendy. You say Lathendal was a TV cameraman who died around sunrise, fell four hours later, and recorded the whole thing in high-definition?”
“I didn’t say anything of the kind, Sarge. And you’re not going to close out this one without climbing out of that squeaky desk chair. The number on Fiske is one-oh-nine.”
Only a narrow slice of downtown along its northwest margin lay within the purview of the Second District. Like many downtowns across the country, this one was crumbling into dissolution around the edges. Fiske Street was one long string of sleazy tenements and largely unoccupied office buildings that no developer would have bothered to remodel.
Except one. In the last block of Fiske, where the ground sloped down toward the north bank of the river, the Hurford Hotel, a five-story relic of the late nineteenth century, was undergoing an extreme makeover, its pitted and smutty limestone façade currently enmeshed in tubular steel scaffolding. According to advance publicity, the ground floor was being converted to specialty shops, the upper floors to luxury apartments.
Scanning the tiers of scaffolding and noticing no workers, Dollinger wondered whether the work stoppage had been triggered by an early morning shower or by the tragic event inside the building. Then, seeing the nonfunctioning traffic signals at the intersection of Fiske and Water, where Patrolman Tyrone Pettiford was directing traffic with authoritative blasts on his whistle, he remembered from morning report that a power shutdown had been scheduled in this block today.
When Dollinger arrived at the Hurford Hotel, Fiske Street was still open to southbound traffic, despite obstacles created by Mescoulin Construction’s toolshed, a crane, and a couple of parked trucks. An enormous black RV, bearing the flamboyant logo of Matador Productions Unlimited in silver, was parked at the curb just north of the hotel.
Officer Cameron met Dollinger in the lofty lobby, which was overhung and overlooked at each of the four upper floors by a railed gallery. Directly overhead, an intricate maze of scaffolding crisscrossed beneath a shallow dome and extended upward inside a glazed cupola.
Cameras on tripods, banks of lights, wooden packing cases, plastic tool totes, step-ladders, screens, reflectors, and sound recording equipment stood cheek-by-jowl around the lobby. Heavy black cable snaked here and there underfoot. From somewhere below street level came muffled metallic bangs and crashes and an occasional yelp of exasperation.
The lobby was drafty and chilly. A bolt of sunlight stabbed down through one of the windows in the cupola, drawing Dollinger’s attention to an inert form sprawled under a blue plastic tarpaulin on a massive reception desk at the geometric center of the lobby. He raised a corner flap to view the battered, bepurpled, pencil-mustached face of the late Simon Lathendal, who was wearing a green waterproof windbreaker over casual street clothes. The grotesque angulation of his neck and the hideous deformation of his skull spoke of the kind of violence dealt out by hurtling vehicles and unopposed gravity.
The only living person present in the lobby besides Cameron was Nick Stamaty, the coroner’s investigator, who sat in a far corner entering data on a laptop.
“What are they making here,” Dollinger asked Cameron, “a documentary on the remodeling, an infomercial . . . ?”
“Not even close. These are the people who do the TV show Illegal in Some States.”
Although far from being a couch potato, Dollinger occasionally watched the program, mainly because of its law enforcement theme. Each week’s show traced the perpetration of a con, scam, or sting that would have been a criminal operation in some states, but wasn’t illegal in the state where it was carried out. Real estate swindles, bait-and-switch traps, investment clubs with Ponzi features, bogus liquidation sales, bundling or double ticketing of retail items, nonsustainable pyramid schemes, volume discount contracts with fine print obliging the subscriber to buy hundreds of dollars’ worth of unwanted merchandise . . .
In most states such activities were unlawful. But in a few, although they might violate unwritten standards of conduct or rules of fair practice, they weren’t prohibited by any law, and the scalawags who pulled them off couldn’t be prosecuted. Each program was a composite of segments shot over a period of weeks to allow the maturation and eventual hatching of some sleazy plot. Each segment of each show took place in a different venue, and the producers managed to whet public interest with broad hints that they had to keep on the run because some of the activities were carried out in states where they were illegal.
“So what diabolical trickery are they up to this time?”