Nothing. He was unhurt.

The man had missed. From fifteen feet away Keith had missed.

He whispered to Meg, "It's all right, I'm okay."

She was shaking her head. "What'm I going to do about this?"

"What?" Pellam asked.

Meg didn't answer. Her head was lowered in concentration, frowning as she studied the diamonds on her finger. "Look at this ring. Look at it. What a mess."

Meg held up her hand, covered with the blood that spread from the front of her blouse. "Can you help me? I'll never get it clean." Her smile faded. Her eyes fluttered closed. "Can you help me," she whispered as she spiraled slowly to the floor. "Can you?"

26

Trudie, tanned and dark-haired and model-thin (the best calves of any women he'd ever known but, alas, no freckles anywhere on her body), drove east on Santa Monica, moving slowly in the morning traffic toward the expressway.

John Pellam sat on the passenger side of her white Mercedes 450 SL.

He sat silently, with his suitcase (purchased on Main Street, Cleary, not Rodeo Drive) on his lap. Trudie was animated. She was preoccupied with a teleplay Lorimar was kicking around. She had a fifty-two percent interest in the property. He thought that's what she'd told him. The radio was loud and she nodded in time to the beat, smiling broadly, though Pellam knew that what she hummed was the tune of business, not a Top 40 hit.

Pellam thought she was a wonderful woman. He'd enjoyed going out with her. He'd enjoyed staying with her, lying in a huge bed, sipping sweet liquor drinks on a cement patio high above a junglish canyon (Trudie had a fall-er house).

They passed the park in Beverly Hills where one morning-must have been five a.m.-he'd found Tommy Bernstein, in a tuxedo, passed out. Pellam himself had been wasted. Tommy had said to him, "Fuck, it's the U.S. Cavalry. Get me home. Am I in bed? I don't think so, no, I don't. Get me home!"

After much time and effort Pellam had.

At Tommy's funeral the minister had been a hired gun, which wasn't too surprising, since Tommy hadn't been inside a church in thirty years. The somber man said a lot of innocuous things. Generic-brand sentiments. Not to put that down, of course. Pellam thought the doughy old guy with the stiff white collar had done a good job, under the circumstances. "The lively spirit that Thomas had, the spirit that touched us all with the love for the characters he played…" Well, Tommy'd have said, "Barf on that," and howled. But that was hardly the minister's fault. The funeral had been near the intersection they were passing through just then. Avenue of the Stars.

"I talked to that exec producer."

Trudie liked that, shortening words and slinging them around. Exec, photog, res, as in Make a res at a restaurant.

"Yeah?" he asked brightly.

"He was like beside himself."

"Yeah?" Pellam couldn't remember exactly which exec she was talking about, or why he was, or should be, beside himself. They drove in silence, through that brilliant light, California light, that seems to bring out some essential radiation from the grass and trees. It gets right in your face, like a beautiful, obnoxious teenage girl. From behind his sunglasses Pellam watched the scenery. And the cars-a thousand German cars, it seemed-moving opposite, toward Hollywood.

"Won't be back for a while, huh?"

"Probably not."

Trudie didn't answer, just squeezed his knee. She turned the radio up. They were in Beverly Hills; sentiment didn't exist.

"So," she said. "You sure you want to do this?"

"Yep," he said and didn't add anything else.

Ten silent minutes later she dropped him at the airport. He didn't want or expect her to get out. They kissed like siblings and the only clues to the deepest moments of their on-again, off-again year together was a shallow shaking of her head and the sad, mystified smile she lapsed into from time to time.

"Call me sometime," she said.

Pellam promised that he would.

He handed his suitcase to the curbside check-in attendant, and when he turned back, Trudie was gone.

John Pellam sat on a hundred-year-old gravestone, looking out over this upstate New York valley, filled with trees gone to vibrant yellow red. The sun had just disappeared under a row of clouds and the beautiful scenery had taken on an ominous nature.

Adding to which was the young man moving stealthily toward Pellam. He was dressed in a dark shirt and jeans. When he was twenty feet away the man paused and closed his eyes, as if finding strength from somewhere, then drew a black pistol from his back pocket.

He started forward once more.

Pellam rose from the cold stone and squinted at the furtive approach.

Suddenly motion on the ground nearby. The man reared back in surprise and stumbled over a low tombstone. "Jesus Christ," he called, dropping the pistol.

"What?" Came a booming voice from a loudspeaker.

"It attacked me!" the man called, standing up and brushing grass from his slacks.

The electronic voice of God yelled, "Cut it, cut! What the hell happened?"

The field filled with people. The crew walked around from behind the Panaflex camera, makeup went to work on the actor's face. He called, "A squirrel… he attacked me!"

A stuntman grabbed his jacket and leapt into the graveyard, crying, "Toro, toro!"

"Hilarious," the director called sarcastically through the loudspeaker.

Pellam walked away from the gravestone and sat down in an old green-plaid lawn chair next to his Winnebago. He said, "You cold? You want to go inside?"

Meg squeezed his hand and said, "No, I wouldn't miss this for anything."

"I want a continuous shot," the director sighed and walked back to the camera. Somebody from Wardrobe was rolling up the actor's cuffs so they wouldn't get dark from the moisture on the grass. The continuity girl began making notes of his position when the wild animal had attacked and the location of all the cameras and backgrounds.

"What's the take?"

"That'll be eight," someone called.

"Jesus. And we'll lose the light in ten minutes. What's the weather supposed to be tomorrow?"

"Rain."

"Jesus."

Pellam and Meg watched the crew in the field. He said, "That's the movies for you. Do it over and over then you wait for a while and do it again."

But Sam at least was enjoying himself, even if he would have preferred a space wars flick or something with machine-gunning robots over some stupid love story called To Sleep in a Shallow Grave. Mostly, it was the huge, complicated camera that he loved.

"Wow," he'd say to Pellam. "It's like a spaceship." And Pellam got the okay from the director of photography to put him in the operator's seat for a few minutes.

Alan Lefkowitz ducked out of his honey wagon and trooped toward the director. He was wearing his play clothes, his on-set clothes-chinos and a red-and-white striped shirt (Pellam told Meg, "That's what the refs would wear if Hollywood had its own hockey team"). The producer said, "Hey, Johnny." To Pellam he lifted his hand, which held an invisible glass of a very expensive single-malt scotch, and raised his eyebrows.

Pellam said, "Can't. I've got plans."

"Around here? Lefkowitz joked, gazing longingly at Meg's jeans-clad butt, and began waving papers at the director again.

"So," Pellam said, "what's happening in Cleary?"

She laughed and didn't answer. "Let's go for a walk. That'd be okay?"

"They've got the telephoto on. We walk that way, toward the forest, we won't be in view. You feeling okay?"

"Hell, yes."

She took the cane and got up without his help. They walked past the crowd of locals, which had grown by the dozens with each day of shooting; small-town life had skidded to a stop for the duration of the principal photography. The spectators were enthralled with everything-even the squirrel attack-and they stood silent and frozen as if their fidgeting motion might knock the magic camera to the ground.