“Did he fool around on her?” I asked.
“No.” He shook his head emphatically. “No, it was more like he enjoyed knowing he still had it. He liked the attention of pretty women, knowing they dug his action. Yeah, it was childish, and down the road maybe all that playing with fire would have gotten him burned, but he truly loved Karen, and he was determined to stay faithful to her.”
“With his body, if not his mind,” I said.
“Exactly.” He smiled, then sighed. “Look, I bankrolled this company with Daddy’s money, okay? I signed off on the loans. Without my name, no way it would have got off the ground. And I have a passion for it, and I’m not dumb, but David, he had talent. He was the face of this company, and the soul. People did business with us because David went out and made the contacts. David reached out to the independent film companies, the industrials, the commercials guys. It was David who convinced Warner Brothers that they should get their Panther dolly through us when they were shooting that Costner movie here last year, and once they liked the dolly they came back to us for replacement thirty-fives, replacement lights, filters, booms.” He chuckled. “You name it, they were always breaking something. Then they began to transfer their raw stock on our Rank when theirs went down, and cut their second-unit stuff on our Avids. And it was David who pulled that money in. Not me. David had charm and pizzazz, but more than that, you believed him. His word was his bond, and he never fucked anyone on a deal. David would have made this company. Without him?” He looked around the room, gave all that youth and energy and equipment a small shrug and a sad smile. “We’ll probably go under within eighteen months.”
“Who profits if you do?”
He thought about it for a bit, drummed his palms on his bare knees. “A few rival companies, I suppose, but not in any huge way. We weren’t taking all that much business, so I’m not sure we’ll leave all that much business to scoop up if we go under.”
“You got the Warner Brothers gig.”
“True. But Eight Millimeter got the Branagh film Fox Searchlight did here, and Martini Shot landed the Mamet film. I mean, we all had our slices of pie, and none were too big or too little. I can tell you that nobody’s going to make millions or even hundreds of thousands because David’s no longer on the scene.” He placed his hands behind his head and looked up at the steel rafters and exposed heating pipes. “It would have been nice, though. As David used to say, we might not have gotten rich, but we might have gotten comfy.”
“What about the insurance?”
He used his hands to push his head back toward me, looked into my eyes with his elbows framing his face. “What about it?”
“I heard Karen Nichols was going broke trying to pay David’s medical bills.”
“And that led you to believe…?”
“That he wasn’t insured.”
Ray Dupuis studied me, his eyelids hooded, his body very still. I waited, but after a minute of his staring, I held out my hands.
“Look, Ray, I’m not after anyone in this place. You had to do some creative financing to keep afloat? Fine. Or you-”
“It was David,” he said quietly.
“What?”
He dropped his heels off the desk and his hands fell from behind his head.
“David sent a-” His face screwed up as if he were chewing tabs of acid, and he looked away for a minute. When he spoke again, his voice was almost a whisper. “You learn not to trust. Particularly in this business where everyone’s charming, everyone’s your friend, everyone loves you until you give them the bill. David, I swear to Christ, I had always believed was different. I trusted him.”
“But?”
“‘But.’” He snorted at the word, looked back up at the rafters with a defeated grin. “About six weeks before he was hurt, David canceled the insurance policy. Not on the equipment, just on the employees, himself included. The quarterly payment was due, and instead of paying it, he canceled. I’m sure he was rolling the dice-you know, borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, planning to move the money someplace else, maybe into the Steadicam.”
“Was money that tight?”
“Oh, yeah. My personal finances are tight, and Daddy’s locked the vault for a while. We have a lot of outstanding bills sitting on our clients’ desks, and once they’re paid, we’ll be okay, but the last few months have been lean. So, sure, I can see why David did it. I just don’t understand why he didn’t tell me, and why the money he saved never left the company bank account.”
“It’s still there?”
He nodded. “It was when he got hurt. I paid the insurance with it, bottomed out the rest of the account putting twenty percent down on the Steadicam, taking out a loan for the rest.”
“But you’re sure it was David who contacted the insurance agency?”
For a few minutes, he seemed unsure whether he should kick me out of the office or come all the way clean. In the end, he chose the latter, and I was glad, because I doubt I could have lived with the indignity of having my ass chucked to the street by a group of guys who’d collectively seen Star Wars more times than they’d had sex.
He glanced around to make sure no one in the warehouse was paying attention to us, and then he used a small key to unlock a lower desk drawer. After rifling through it for a few moments, he withdrew a single sheet of paper and handed it across the desk to me.
It was a copy of a letter from Wetterau sent to their insurance company. It expressly stated that Wetterau, Chief Financial Officer of Pickup on South Street, wished to cancel the HMO coverage of all employees, including himself. At the bottom, he’d signed it.
Ray Dupuis said, “The insurance company sent that to me when I filed a claim on David’s behalf. They refused to pay a dime. I came up with what I could, Karen came up with what she could before she stopped coming up with anything at all, and the bill keeps growing. David had no family, so ultimately, I guess, the state will pay for it, but Karen and I were both afraid he’d end up warehoused in some shitty facility, so we tried to get him first-class care for a while, but it was just too much for two people ultimately.”
“Did you know Karen well?”
He nodded several times. “Sure.”
“What’d you think of her?”
“She’s the girl the hero gets at the end of the movie. You know the one? Not the hot, sexy babe who ultimately turns out to be trouble, but the good girl. The one who’d never write you a Dear John if you were off at war. The one who’s always there, you just have to be smart enough to see it. Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo , if only Jimmy Stewart had been smart enough to see past her glasses.”