"A phone number, an address, whatever."
"Call me later. About four, okay?" He hung up.
"People are hanging up on me today," I said to Wyl.
"I can tell. Your left ear is getting callused."
I hefted the stack of stuff he'd given me. "Thanks for the archives," I said. "I'll get them back to you in a day or two." Yellow stick-it papers protruded from the pile of magazines and newspapers. Each was meticulously labeled with a date. "Must have been a lot of work," I said.
"It was fun, actually. I don't think he's got staying power, though. Steve McQueen he's not."
"Wyl," I said, "he's not even Butterfly McQueen."
"Oooh," Wyl said, "Gone With the Wind. She was terrific." "Tara's Theme" rang out behind me as I left.
Toby had caused hospital-scale injuries to a sixteen-year-old girl named Rebecca Hartsfield during a shoot at Ontario Motor Speedway four years ago-two years before the mayhem in Northridge that Dixie and Stillman had described as his first "problem" incident. As I pulled into the Universal lot I decided not to ask them about it until I'd talked to the girl, if I actually got to talk to the girl. People move in Southern California more often than they do anywhere else in the world, and a four-year-old address could be more outdated than the pillbox hat I remembered my mother buying because she liked Jackie Kennedy's.
When the guard pushed open the door to the closed set where High Velocity was filming, Norman Stillman himself greeted me. The requisite blue blazer and white slacks had been augmented by a captain's hat, but Stillman's expression was not that of a seasoned sea dog hardened by misadventure on the bounding main. He looked like the anxious, if overage, freshman who had sat down in Dixie's class all those years ago.
"Here you are," he said in a highly keyed stage whisper. "They're already in his dressing room. She came early, the bitch."
"How early?"
He steered me across the sound stage. "Half an hour."
"Good policy," I said. "She's no dope."
"Don't mention dope," Stillman hissed. "So far, no problem." The lights on the set were off, so his insistence on speaking sotto voce was an affectation, but it was an effective one. I found myself lowering my own voice in return.
"What are they talking about?"
"Before she kicked me out, she was asking about how he'd feel when High Velocity was finished."
"Not much news there," I said, wishing I'd been around when Joanna Link kicked Norman Stillman out of his own star's dressing room.
"That's what's worrying me. You don't talk to a star about his series when the ratings have dropped unless you plan to slip him a shiv."
"Shiv?" We were most of the way across the sound stage.
"You know, a knife. Unless you plan to stab him in the back," he explained with an air of exaggerated impatience. "Jesus, you don't know what a shiv is?"
"Sure. I was wondering how you knew." We were at Toby's door.
He looked blank. "Scripts," he said, thinking about something else. "Do you think she'll let you in?"
"Toby will let me in. Whether she'll let me stay in, that's the question."
"Well, I know that," he said for the second time in two days. I made a mental note to use it the next time I had nothing to say. "Good luck," Stillman said, pushing the door open.
"Do you think the young people of America have learned anything from High Velocity!" said a thickening blond lady with four-inch fingernails as the door closed behind me. She glanced up at me with irritation and gave the tiny tape recorder in front of her a businesslike shake as though she thought my intrusion might have caused its circuits to malfunction. Then she turned her attention back to Toby, who was seated in front of a mirror framed by globular white light bulbs. Dixie hovered behind him, looking fatally apprehensive.
"Joanna," Toby said, "this isn't Ibsen. Half the show is cars crashing into other cars." Dixie wilted visibly, and Toby caught it in the mirror. He gave Joanna Link a budgeted grin, sort of an amplified smirk. "We're doing entertainment here. But every episode has a moraclass="underline" Crime doesn't pay; Drugs aren't good; Sooner or later, virtue triumphs."
"Usually later."
"Albert Schweitzer chatting with Pope John Paul for an hour isn't going to hold the people we're talking to. That's public television. People who watch public television don't get into trouble. Kids don't watch public television. Maybe it would be better if they did, but they don't. They watch us. And, week after week, we make a point that Parents magazine couldn't disagree with."
"So you think the departure of High Velocity will leave a moral void on television?" The tone was so snotty that I felt like giving her a handkerchief so she could blow her voice.
Toby ignored it. He reached out and took one of her extravagantly clawed hands between his. "We'll be around in reruns," he said. "And even if we weren't, television is a responsible industry. As long as there are producers like Norman, the medium won't be a source of moral decay."
"This isn't quotable," she said, withdrawing her hand but giving his a coy little pat as she did it. "And who's he?" She indicated me, Chinese style, with her chin.
"Who, Simeon?" Toby said, his face as open as a freshly washed window. "He's a friend. We're going out together after we wrap today."
"He's not a PR man, is he? Dixie's more than enough PR for now." Dixie shrugged philosophically. He looked as if he were trying to get his suit high enough to hide him completely.
"Does he look like a PR man?" Toby asked in his most reasonable voice.
"No," she said. "He looks like something the hippies left behind." She had one of those decayed little-girl faces that always made me think of Shirley Temple on cortisone.
Dixie laughed despairingly. "Joanna," he said, "you're priceless."
"By which you mean unbuyable, I assume."
"How do you type with those fingernails?" I asked.
"Oh, we've heard from Toby's friend," she said, flexing her fingers. "These aren't nails, they're talons." Over her shoulder, Dixie waved frantically. She looked up at me and narrowed her puffy eyes. "At least that proves you aren't PR," she said. "No one in PR thinks I type my own stories."
"Simeon Grist, Joanna Link," Dixie said with more than a trace of desperation in his voice. "Joanna, Simeon."
Joanna Link turned her back on me. I might as well have been a heating vent. "So what about this girl, Toby?" she said.
Dixie's face slammed shut like the gates of heaven before Attila the Hun. Toby was better. "Girl?" he said. "What girl?"
"The stripper who was killed a few nights ago. This Amber something or other."
"Stackheimer," I said, volunteering the name Nana had given me. "Amber Stackheimer."
Now Dixie looked truly frantic. Even Toby's composure slipped a notch. Link turned slowly to face me.
"I'm talking to Toby," she said. She chewed her lower lip, leaving a scarlet smear of lipstick on her teeth. "You knew her?" she asked after a moment, scratching at the inside of her left arm with the claws on her right hand.
"We were dating," I said. "Terrible thing. She was just about to get her life in order. There are so many lost souls out there." I made a gesture in the general direction of East. "In L.A., you know."
Joanna Link looked from me to Toby and then back to me again. "Wait," she said. "We all know about Toby's little problem, even if we haven't written about it yet."
"And that's a good idea," Dixie put in, "unless we've got proof. And lots of very good insurance."
"Shut up," Joanna Link said absently. She chewed at the inside of her cheek. The woman was clearly orally fixated, probably an ex-smoker. "You were her date? You weren't in the pictures."
I shrugged. "I'm not a star."