“What are you doing up so late,” she asked, “sitting all by yourself in the dark?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I thought cocoa might help.” There was a half-empty cup of chocolate on the table.
“Cocoa? That’s a hoot.”
“A proper insomnia remedy for a senator’s wife,” she replied with a wistful smile.
Fancy, never one to beat around the bush, asked, “You’re mending your ways, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know damn well what I mean. You’re changing your image in the hopes that Uncle Tate will get elected and keep you on when he goes to Washington.” She assumed a confidential, just-between-us-girls pose. “Tell me, did you give up humping all your boyfriends, or just Eddy?”
Her aunt’s head snapped up. Her face went pale. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and wheezed, “What did you say?”
“Don’t play innocent. I suspected it all along,” Fancy said breezily. “I confronted Eddy with it.”
“And what did he say?”
“Nothing. Didn’t deny it. Didn’t admit it. He responded as a gentleman should.” Snorting rudely, she headed for the door that led to the other rooms of the house. “Don’t worry. There’s enough shit flying around here already. I’m not going to tell Uncle Tate. Unless…”
She spun around, her attitude combative. “Unless you pick up your affair with Eddy again. It’s me he’s gonna be screwing from now on, not you. G’night.”
Feeling smug and satisfied for having made herself so unequivocally understood, Fancy sashayed from the kitchen. One look in the mirror over her bedroom dresser confirmed that her face was a mess.
It didn’t occur to Fancy until days later that Carole was the only one in the family who had even noticed that she was sporting a black eye and a busted lip, and that she hadn’t ratted on her.
Twenty
Van Lovejoy’s apartment was House Beautiful’s worst nightmare. He slept on a narrow mattress supported by concrete building blocks. Other pieces of furniture were just as ramshackle, salvaged from flea markets and junk stores.
There was a sad, dusty piñata, a sacrilegious effigy of Elvis Presley, dangling from the light fixture. It was a souvenir he’d brought back from a visit to Nuevo Laredo. The goodies inside—several kilos of marijuana—were but a memory. Except for the piñata, the apartment was unadorned.
The otherwise empty rooms were filled with videotapes. That and the equipment he used to duplicate, edit, and play back his tapes were the only things of any value in the apartment, and their worth was inestimable. Van was better equipped than many small video production companies.
Video catalogs were stacked everywhere. He subscribed to all of them and scoured them monthly in search of a video he didn’t already have or hadn’t seen. Nearly all his income went to keeping his library stocked and updated.
His collection of movies rivaled any video rental store. He studied directing and cinematographic techniques. His taste was eclectic, ranging from Orson Welles to Frank Capra, Sam Peckinpah to Steven Spielberg. Whether filmed in black and white or Technicolor, camera moves fascinated him.
Besides the movies, his collection included serials and documentaries, along with every inch of tape he had shot himself in the span of his career. It was known throughout the state that if stock footage of an event was needed and it couldn’t be found elsewhere, Van Lovejoy of KTEX in San Antonio would have it.
He spent all his free time watching tapes. Tonight, his fascination was centered on the raw footage he had shot at the Rocking R Ranch a few days earlier. He’d delivered the tapes to MB Produc
tions, but not before making copies of them for himself. He never knew when something he’d shot years earlier might prove useful or valuable, so he kept copies of everything.
In post-production, MBP would write scripts, edit, record voice-overs, mix music, and end up with slick, fully produced commercials of varying lengths. Van’s camera work would look sterilized and staged by the time the commercials went out over the air. He didn’t care. He’d been paid. What interested him were the candid shots.
Tate Rutledge was charismatic on or off camera. Handsome and affluent, he was a walking success story—the kind of man Van usually despised on principle. But if Van had been a voter, the guy would get his vote just because he seemed to shoot straight from the hip. He didn’t bullshit, even when what he was saying wasn’t particularly what people wanted to hear. He might lose the election, but it wouldn’t be because he lacked integrity.
He kept thinking that there was something wrong with the kid. She was cute enough, although, in Van’s opinion, one kid looked like another. He usually wasn’t called upon to videotape children, but when he was, his experience had been that they had to be threatened or cajoled into settling down, behaving, and cooperating, especially when shooting retakes or reverse questions.
That hadn’t been the case with the Rutledge kid. She was quiet and didn’t do anything ornery. She didn’t do anything, period, unless she was told to, and then she moved like a little wind-up doll. The one who got the most response out of her was Carole Rutledge.
It was she who really held Van enthralled.
Time and again he had played the tapes—those he’d shot of her at the ranch, and those he’d shot on the day she left the clinic. The lady knew what to do in front of a camera.
He’d had to direct Rutledge and the kid, but not her. She was a natural, always turning toward the light, knowing instinctively where to look. She seemed to know what he was about to do before he did it. Her face begged for close-ups. Her body language wasn’t stilted or robotized, like most amateurs.