“I didn’t like him and I made no secret of it. I used to do the screenwriting course and then they gave it to him. I resented that. A great deal, actually. I have much better credentials.”
“Oh?”
“Sold two screenplays to Roger Corman a few years back, and last year NBC took an option on a mini-series idea of mine. Richard never sold anything except one terrible novel.”
Most Roger Corman scripts aren’t terrible? Tobin wanted to ask. But a virus of civilization came over him. “Until recently. I’d consider six hundred thousand dollars a pretty decent sale.” He felt good about defending Richard. That’s what he should be doing, with Richard dead less than twenty-four hours.
“Yes, I’d have to say that was a lot of money.”
“But other than yourself, you don’t have anybody I could add to my suspect list?” He waved the piece of paper at Baines.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“No run-ins with students or faculty members or irate parents?”
“None. He spent very little time here except when he lectured or when he came to see Sarah Nichols.” He inclined his head to the open door. “Her office is right down the hall.”
“Maybe I’ll stop by when I’m finished looking through Richard’s office.”
Baines smiled again. “I don’t recall saying I was going to let you do that. I’m not sure I can let you do that. The police have a yellow piece of tape across the doorframe that means verboten.”
“So you’re not going to let me go in there?”
“He may, but I won’t.”
He didn’t need to turn around to find out who stood in the doorway behind him.
“Hello, Sarah,” Baines said as she came in the room.
She wore a forest-green sweater that made the auburn highlights of her hair dance in the sunshine. Her discreet brown skirt was meant to be prim but was all the sexier for its good intentions.
She didn’t say hello. Just came in and walked up to Tobin and said, “You’re not going in there. You have no right.”
Her beauty faded a bit close up. She’d obviously spent a sleepless night crying.
“In less than twenty-four hours, you struck Richard twice. Now you’re here going through his personal belongings and I won’t have it.”
Perfect fury blazed in her eyes and Tobin knew better than to say anything at all. He just had to let her work through her rage.
“You knew damn well the public preferred him to you and that’s why you wouldn’t let him out of his contract — because you knew that, without him, you wouldn’t be anything.”
He didn’t believe that. Not at all. But all he could do was let her yell.
“So you killed him.” She started pacing now, and if her gestures — wild hand-flinging and glares that teetered on madness — were somewhat theatrical, he sensed that they were deeply felt, too. He was in the presence of a woman who had loved a man in the most profound way possible, and he couldn’t help, but be awed and moved by the experience. “You did the only thing you could to save your trivial little career — you killed him. You killed him!”
And that was when she slapped him.
A good hard right hand exactly on the right cheekbone. Enough to daze him momentarily.
His right hand came up automatically, but fortunately he stopped it in time.
She stood in front of him, enraged and exhausted and completely spent yet somehow she found the strength to raise her hand again, but this time Baines took her wrist so she couldn’t follow through. He let her fall against him, sobbing. As he led her out the door and back to her office, he nodded silently to Richard’s office, giving approval for Tobin to go in and look around.
Which Tobin, a few minutes later, did.
And didn’t find a damn thing.
He stood on the corner of Sixty-eighth Street listening to Nat “King” Cole’s “Christmas Song” coming from the speaker of a small grocery store nearby and watching people float by with holiday shopping bags and mufflers half hiding their faces. He was waiting for a cab. When one came he got in and gave the driver directions to Emory Communications and that was when he saw them.
Just as the cab was pulling away.
Just when he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. The two of them.
Standing near one of the college buildings. Talking.
Richard Dunphy’s agent Michael Dailey and the film student he’d just met, Marcie Pierce.
Dailey was handing her a white envelope of some kind and Marcie was smiling.
Smiling as if she had just been given a Christmas present that included at least half a dozen rubies.
12
5:47 P.M.
“My father’s right. I’m not cut out to be a boss.”
“Jesus, Frank.”
“You want to see the books, Tobin? I mean, would you care to sit down and go over the last P and L? You’d know what a fuck-up I really am.”
“There’s nothing like self-confidence, Frank.” But of course he was lying. He really didn’t have much faith in Frank. He’d once attended one of those gaudy conventions where syndicated shows are sold and bartered to local TV stations. Frank had been a Boy Scout in a room filled with child molesters.
“I’m a fuck-up,” Frank went on. “I’m not ashamed to admit it. Some men are tall — no offense, Tobin — some men have red hair, and some men are fuck-ups. It’s all genetical in the end. All genetical.”
“You’re drunk.”
“You’re not doing too bad yourself.”
“At least I’m not making up words.”
“What words?”
“Genetical. That’s not a word.”
“Well, it damn well should be.”
“Will you for Christ’s sake stop pacing?”
“Oh, sure. Sure. Stop pacing so I can sit over there behind the desk. In the boss’s chair.”
“That’s right. In the boss’s chair. Where you, as Frank Emory, President of Emory Communications, belong.” Tobin waved his sloshing drink as he talked. Sloshing on his sleeve. Sloshing on the couch. Tobin and Emory had been pouring whiskey into empty stomachs for two hours now.
At least he went over, Frank did, and sort of squatted on the edge of the desk. At least he was done with his pacing, which was starting to make Tobin seasick.
“I’m no boss, Tobin.”
“Yeah, but you look like one. Six-two. Patrician features. Graying at the temples. Thick wrists.”
“Thick wrists? What has that got to do with anything?”
“People admire men with thick wrists. Look at these.” Tobin waggled his wrists. “I could be a goddamned fourteen-year-old girl. You’ve got thick wrists and you should be proud of it.”
“Three stations canceled this morning, Tobin.”
So there went their little run of hysteria. That simple sentence was the equivalent of running down Fifth Avenue stark-naked when the temperature was subzero.
“Three?” Tobin said.
“Probably more. I haven’t checked with our sales manager in the past half hour.”
“Three,” Tobin muttered to himself. “So she was right.”
“Who?”
“Sarah Nichols.”
“About what?”
“About Richard being the popular one.”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with it. They’re canceling because we’re not fielding a team anymore. They like the back and forth. The yin and yang.”
“Chamales sort of offered himself this morning.”
“Is that the guy who looks like Sebastian Cabot?”
“Yeah.”
“Not a prayer.”
So Tobin sank back on the couch and watched the sun set red and purple and yellow behind the frost on the window and let Frank pace awhile and then he said, “I need to ask you a question, Frank.”