I said, “Rover, are Paul and I going to be performers in a Hey Look TV production?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“I’m not in the actors’ union. Neither is Paul, I’ll bet.”

“Don’t worry. We don’t get involved with that guild shit. Anyway, there’s no union for the type of performing you’re gonna be doing.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Toodle-ee-oo, boys.”

Fye went out followed by the Mexicans, and then I could hear the bolt slide shut.

Delaney said, “I should have known. I’m so sorry I got you mixed up in this, Strachey.”

“Paul, you didn’t know,” Wenske said. “It was my mom who hired Don, and she couldn’t have known either. Don, care for a drink?”

“Sure.”

We all seated ourselves around an old formica-topped kitchen table, and Wenske opened a fresh bottle of water and passed it around.

“I had figured out,” Wenske said, “that the HLM people were crooked and obnoxious. What I didn’t know until it was too late is that they are criminally insane.”

“Meth freaks, apparently,” I said.

“Just Rover and Mason. That’s where Rover is headed now, I’m sure. They sit around the lodge and do meth. Skutnik doesn’t do drugs at all, as far as I can tell. But in a way he’s the worst of them all because he is delusional.”

“What are his delusions? Other than of grandeur?”

“It is his belief that Hey Look TV will win an Emmy next year. He needs this to happen to make his mother proud. Mason told me she’s in an assisted living place in Beverly Hills, and she calls Hal once a week and says all the other old ladies there have sons and daughters who have won Emmys, and when is Hal going to win one and make her proud, too? Except, have you ever seen Hey Look TV programming?”

“One time I saw part of an episode of Dark Smooches.”

“So you know.”

“Yeah.”

“Mason and Rover are addicts and sadists—well, masochist in Mason’s case—and probably clinically insane.”

“And homicidal,” Delaney said. “I told Eddie about Bryan Kim and Boo Miller.”

Wenske shook his head. “I was so naive. I just thought they were cynical jerks. Guys who held other gay people in contempt and then exploited them. But they’re actually far worse. Poor Bryan. God. If I had any idea he’d be hurt by this…”

“They are preposterous people,” Delaney said. “Lots of people are involved with shady business practices, but how could you have known they were killers?”

I said, “They killed Bryan and Boo Miller to warn off anybody like yourself, Eddie, who might expose how HLM is being propped up by screwing writers and filmmakers, Ponzi financing, and marijuana growing and wholesaling. But they didn’t kill you. And I think I know why.”

“Of course they didn’t kill me,” Wenske said. “They can’t do without me. I’m writing Hal’s Emmy-winning script for Notes from the Bush.”

“How’s it going?”

“Terrible. I don’t know how to write for film. It requires a totally different craft from what you use for prose. It’s about compression, and as a writer I’m about as compressed as Moby Dick. I’ve got these books, and they don’t help at all.” Wenske picked up a battered paperback copy of Making a Good Script Great—A Guide for Writing and Rewriting, by Hollywood script consultant Linda Seger. “I’ve read eight books on screenwriting, and I figure if I keep at this for another twenty years I might be able to learn the basics of the craft. Unfortunately, Hal’s mother isn’t going to live that long.”

“Anyway,” I said, “I take it your life will be worth less after you produce a usable script. I don’t like to bring that up, but I guess you’ve thought of that.”

“Yes, I have. What Hal tells me—he comes up here once a week to check on my progress—what he tells me is, he wants me there at the Emmys to collect my award and thank him profusely for giving me the opportunity to bring my book to the screen. Hal is crazy, and he may actually believe that once I’m out of here I won’t run screaming to the nearest police station. The guy is demented. Rover and Mason, on the other hand, are more connected to reality, meth freaks though they are. So once I finish the script…well, I am very afraid to think about that.”

“So,” Delaney said, “Eddie has two reasons for not finishing the script.”

“One is,” Wenske said, “I’m incompetent at screenwriting.”

“And number two is,” I said, “Rover and Mason might kill you soon after you’re done.”

Delaney said, “So what we have here is a variation on Scheherazade. Eddie has to keep turning in drafts that are bad. Because as soon as he finishes a good one, he’s done for.”

One part of the present equation was missing, however. I said, “But what about Paul and me? We’re onto all this crap. Why are we here in the dungeon? Why didn’t they just kill us and dump our bodies in the Siskiyou County woods?”

Wenske tensed up. “Because,” he said, “they don’t trust me. They think I’m malingering.”

“And how will our presence change that?”

“They plan on torturing you in my presence unless I hurry up and present them with a usable script.”

I looked around at the devices resting back in the shadows of Mason’s dungeon.

I said, “Then I guess we all have to get out of here somehow. Any ideas on how we can do it?”

Wenske said, “No. And believe me, I’ve thought of little else.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Wenske had some energy bars he’d been given by his captors, and I ate a couple of those for dinner. He showed Delaney and me the script he’d been working on on the laptop Hively had provided, but I didn’t know what to make of it. I tried to see the story and characters in my head as I read along, but it was all terribly sketchy. I admired anybody who could tell a story using this spare vocabulary, and I admired anybody who could make it all come to life with actors, lighting, a setting, and film or video cameras.

After I’d read several pages, I said, “What’s this? A nude scene? It says Eddie and Jarvis stare at each other’s genitals lustfully.”

“There have to be four nude scenes, Mason told me. It’s Hey Look policy. In that scene, I just wrote what I was told to write. In the end, it will hardly matter.”

“But you’re supposed to bring your superior writing skills to the project so that Hal can win an Emmy. Hively is trying to turn Notes from the Bush into Dark Smooches. How is that going to make Mother Skutnik proud?”

Wenske said, “The nude scenes per se aren’t going to be the problem with the film. The story is about my experience coming out as a middle schooler, and such people do sometimes take their clothes off. Nudity is fine with me. But with the sex stuff—which in the book happens almost entirely in my head except for one kiss—they won’t be able to cast actual fourteen-year-olds and keep themselves out of jail. So Mason wants to cast Cleft Beardsley and Kirk Dirkley, and those guys are at least thirty-one.”

“The stars of Dark Smooches?”

“Being spectacularly untalented, they’re available and they’re cheap. And they’re not under-aged.”

“Not hardly.”

Delaney said, “This is total insanity. Eddie, your smart, sweet, brave book—fucked up! It must be agonizing to see this happening.”

“Yeah, the biggest problem,” Wenske said, “is not that Mason and Rover and Hal are insane. It’s that they’re hacks. One reason the pages I show them are unacceptable is that I don’t know screenwriting. But the other reason is, what they want is what most people think of as good writing, but these guys have no clue as to what good writing is. They wouldn’t recognize it if it bit them on the ass. Or, since they consider Dark Smooches one of HLM’s proudest achievements, I should probably say on the neck.”

“Then why have you write it at all?” I said. “If Mason believes he can do as well, why doesn’t he just write the script himself? He can go ahead and turn your parents into Blake and Crystal Carrington and you and your East Greenbush junior high school friends into a gay-ish cast of Oliver except naked and played by twenty-six-year-olds.”