“Here.”
The script was in a nice black leather cover. He hefted it, then leafed through it. “Thanks. Oh. One more question.”
“What?”
“Starrett says Michael was embezzling from Richard. Did you hear anything about that?”
“Richard found a note that Michael wrote me. Right after that, all this talk of embezzlement came up. Michael and Richard were going to formally end their relationship next month, when Richard tried to get a new show for himself.”
“That isn’t how Michael acted the night Richard was killed. He didn’t give any hint they weren’t getting along.”
“He didn’t have much choice. You don’t exactly walk around broadcasting that your biggest client has left you.” Then she paused and said, “I see where this is leading.”
“I have to put Michael on my list.”
“He didn’t kill him.”
He sighed, looking at her in a kind of disbelief. He recognized her expression, had seen it many times. Love. Her very own kind of protective love. Only now it was not for him or for Richard but for that most unlikely and undeserving man, Michael. Tobin stood in her living room and felt invisible worlds crashing in on him. No one is more of a stranger than someone who loved you once but loves you no longer. A burdensome sadness came over him — for both of them — and he said quietly, “He still needs to go on the list, Jane. At least for now.”
“I don’t think I want you here anymore.”
“I know.”
“Are we even friends now?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Do I need to see you to the door?”
“No,” he said. “No, you don’t.”
Then he was gone.
20
5:17 P.M.
There was champagne. Real champagne. There were party hats. There were pink and yellow and blue streamers and confetti of a thousand colors. And there were women — bloody Christ, but were there women. Some with fetching faces. Some with beguiling breasts. Some with asses that winked and some with asses that frowned. There was enough laughter to fill an NFL locker room after a winning Superbowl and enough patter to keep Vegas (Hiya/Loveya/Kissya) in business for a year. There was a party going on at Emory Communications and Tobin did not need to ask why. Frank Emory had sold his way out of failure.
“Tobin. Goddamn — Tobin!”
Frank was drunk and kind of squatting down and holding his arms wide as if Tobin were going to come running into them. Despite the dignity his height and gray hair and preppy manner should have given him, he was anything but dignified now. This was Frank at his worst. Trying to be one of the boys. He was as bad at it as Tobin.
“Hi, Frank.”
“ ‘Hi Frank.’ That’s all I get on the biggest day of my life?”
“Congratulations.”
“At the least, buddy-boy. At the least.”
“Don’t call me buddy-boy, all right?”
“Jesus, did you come up here to queer my party?”
“Actually, I came up to ask you a few questions. I didn’t know you were having a party.”
Frank sloshed champagne. “That’s all I’m going to do for the next six months. Party. Party my ass off.”
His wife, who had been kissing cheeks, turned to Tobin and said, “Make that plural. Party our asses off.” She beamed. “Aren’t you proud of him?”
“For selling out?”
“For selling out at a profit, Tobin. For a profit. That’s what’s important,” she said.
“A big profit, Tobin,” Frank said. “A goddamn big profit.”
So there was no talking to him, not now anyway, so Tobin circulated, hearing tales of adultery and business betrayals and careering and the latest suspected AIDS victim and watching old men try to steal quick feels from young women, and watching young women try to cajole better jobs from old men. He stood by the Christmas tree and looked out over Manhattan, the night a crypt, his lungs raw from cigarette smoke, his mind fixed on misery, Jane’s look there at the last, Huggins’s trying to prove him a killer, Neely never growing up.
“I’m sorry I was so rude.”
Sarah Nichols, looking more the Irish beauty than ever, touched his arm. There was no doubting what Richard had seen in her. Why he’d spent more and more time with her. Her eyes, her hazel eyes, cast you in their grace and you never wanted to leave. “Out at the college, I mean.”
“It’s all right.”
“No, it isn’t. I was just upset. I don’t really think you killed him.”
“Then you seem to be in the minority.”
“The police still suspect you?”
“I’m afraid they do.”
“Well, anyway, I just wanted to come over and say I was sorry.”
“I accept.”
“Thank you.”
She turned to leave.
He said, on a whim, really, half serious about his question but at least half motivated by the tidal power of those hazel eyes, “Do you know a man named Ebsen at the college?”
“Harold Ebsen. Sure. Everybody does.”
“Then you probably know what he says about Richard?”
“That Richard stole his screenplay?”
“Yes.”
“He’s s been saying that for months.”
“Is it true?”
She surprised him. “I don’t know.”
“You mean you think there’s a chance Richard actually cribbed his screenplay?”
“Oh, not cribbed it exactly. Took something that was very primitive, perhaps, and improved it. Improved it a great deal.”
“Do you think Ebsen would have killed him over it?”
“I have absolutely no doubt Ebsen would have killed him over it. After he followed us around with that shotgun microphone, I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
“Shotgun microphone?”
“A few months ago, when he really began pestering Richard and me, he started following us everywhere with a shotgun microphone he stole from the school’s production department. Then the next day he’d drop off the tape in Richard’s office. Obviously it gave him a great sense of power.”
“But you never heard him actually threaten Richard?”
“Threaten him physically, you mean?”
“Right.”
“Not actually, no. But with somebody like him, that’s always there implicitly.” She nodded with her lovely head. “Here’s your friend.” She looked matronly suddenly, sixty-year-old disapproval on the face of a young woman. Something was going on behind him that displeased her.
He turned to see Frank Emory doing a kind of dirty boogie, legs flailing, to a disco song that was blasting out of wall speakers.
“Richard always said he was a silly ass. He wasn’t wrong.”
Then Frank was with them and throwing his arm around Tobin and pressing his head against Tobin’s head and spilling champagne everywhere. “Am I drunk, or what?”
“You’re very drunk,” Sarah Nichols said. “Inexcusably drunk, as a matter of fact.”
She went away.
“She never liked me.”
“Right now you’re sort of hard to like.”
“You don’t like me? My old friend Tobin doesn’t like me on the happiest night of my life?”
“The night you got married — the nights your kids were born — one of those should have been the happiest night of your life. Not this, Frank. This just means you couldn’t take the heat anymore and you gave up.”
Tobin saw how badly he’d hurt him and for just a moment he took at least some small pleasure from the pain he’d inflicted, but then he saw Frank’s face — the jaw coming open, the drunken eyes go dead — and then he knew he’d had no right to say that, no matter how true it might be.
“Jesus, Frank, I’m going to go.”
Frank’s tears were obvious. “I thought we were friends.”
“We are.” And this time it was Tobin who threw his arm around Frank. (Not easy, given Tobin’s height.) “We’re goddamn good friends, and I had no right to say it. I don’t blame you a damn bit. I would have done the same thing myself as soon as Richard was killed. I have to put my ego aside and just look at the facts. Without the team, there was no show.”