Chet The Dog

Posts Tagged ‘script girl’

Aide-Memoire in a Complicated Case

From July 16:

“Those two guys?” Bernie said. “No idea. Two actors from some old movie?”

“Not exactly,” said Muriel Breit. She’s our go-to guy when it comes to movies, have I mentioned that already? She ran the film through her machine again, real fast this time. I didn’t like that at all, in fact felt a bit pukey. But no actual puking happened. Muriel pressed a button and the film stopped, right where the two dudes – the bald guy and the one with glasses – were wrestling for the gun and the young woman was falling. She pointed her finger at the screen. Muriel’s finger was interesting – yellow at the tip and smelling strongly, strongly to me, at least, of cigarettes. I felt like shifting sideways a little and giving that finger a quick lick, and was still considering it when Muriel said:

“The bald one is Erich von Stroheim. The one with the glasses is Louis B. Mayer.”

Bon Mot, Forgotten (Corrected Version)

Bernie got off the dozer. We walked toward the rubble pile, and there, balanced between two rocks, sat a human skull. Yes, I’d seen this skull before, just before that cave-in.

“Oh my God,” said Addie. “Do you think that’s my great grandmother’s sister?”

“We’ll need DNA to establish that,” Bernie said.

DNA – that came up from time to time in our job, but what it is exactly I couldn’t tell you.

We stood in front of the skull, all of us quiet. There were tears in Addie’s eyes. She took Bernie’s hand. Once Bernie told Suzie that some crimes are – what was it, again? I tried to remember.

Story Structure

“Yes,” said Addie, great granddaughter of Addie Kline, twin sister of Betty, script girl who disappeared. “She went for a hike and never came back. Search teams looked, but they didn’t find her.”

“Where was this?” Bernie said.

“Death Valley. She was working on the Greed shoot. My great grandmother Addie was never the same, my mom told me. Apparently she felt that part of her soul was missing. I just wanted to know if you found out anything. I don’t like stories without endings.”

“Stories without endings is the modern way,” Bernie said.

“I know,” Addie said, “but that seems perverse to me. Our lives have a beginning, middle and end, so why shouldn’t the stories about them have the same structure?”

“I don’t know,” Bernie said. “This is above my pay grade. Are you a professor or something?”

Addie smiled. “In training.”

“Got any money?”

“Some. Why?”

“We’re going to need some heavy equipment, a backhoe maybe, for a day or so.”

“What for?”

Bernie turned to me. “I think Chet knows.”

Oops. Hadn’t really been following this, mostly on account of some interesting scraps I was finding under the table.

Higher Education

We met the great granddaughter of Addie Kline at an outdoor cafe near downtown, actually in the college area. College kids are great! They’re always hanging out, having fun, playing Frisbee, and they have lots of time for me and my kind. The great granddaughter of Addie Kline was also named Addie, kind of confusing, Addie something or other. She looked young enough to be a college student herself.

“I read Suzie Sanchez’s story in the Tribune,” she said. “There was something about a mystery on the Greed set. My great grandmother’s twin Betty was a script girl on that shoot. She went for a hike and never came back.”

“A hike?” said Bernie.

And maybe he added more, but at that moment a Frisbee came gliding by, so tempting.