He gave chase.
ELEVEN
Argumentative voices rose up through the grates of the elevator cage that carried the spatting couple to the lower level. Even a foreigner who didn’t speak the language could follow the story of the opera. The timbre of one voice was strident and unyielding, designed to hurt without remorse. The other was tinged with a depth of sadness that comes of knowing that more is about to be lost than merely an argument. Still on the floor above them, Stein looked rapidly around for a staircase.
“Leave them alone,” Lila said. “They have enough problems.”
“I wish I could.”
In her reluctantly assumed role as helpmate, Lila pointed out the stairway door. Stein yanked it open and raced down ahead of her. “Don’t wait for me, or anything,” she admonished, and began a careful, wobbly, banister holding descent
Vane and Hart were so deep in their argument that they did not immediately step out of the elevator when it reached the basement. Only in the ghastly aftermath of a particularly savage comment was there a moment’s silence, during which David Hart emerged from the elevator, with his suppliant in futile pursuit. Both were surprised to see Stein already there, taking in the sight. The walls were well stocked with Espe New Millennium shampoo bottles. Perhaps a thousand of them. Stein hated being lied to by people he liked and he liked Paul Vane. “So this is ‘just barely enough’ to satisfy your few loyal customers?”
Vane dropped his countenance in shame. Hart did not. He turned upon Stein the full unleashed power of the Post-Reagan disdain for anyone who thought that guilty executives should face consequences. “Whose lackey are you?” he spat. “That bitch cunt Espe?”
“Please, David. You’re being rude,” Vane said quietly.
“I’m being rude? That little whore stole your life’s work. I’d think you’d care, if not for your own sad self then for me. You’d think I’d count for something.”
“You count,” Vane said, his voice disappearing into the stale canyons of old arguments. “David has nothing to do with this,” he confessed to Stein. “It was all my doing.”
“And of course I believe you, since you’ve never lied to me.”
“Come,” Paul Vane beckoned them. “All will be revealed.”
He led them back up the flight of stairs to the main level where Lila was still waiting, then through the double door that opened into a large, sunny white-walled room with high windows and a beautifully redone blond wood floor. There were rolled backdrops and reflective umbrellas. Stationary lights were mounted on aluminum poles and a 35mm camera on a tripod. A pair of handcuffs and a silk top hat were left on the sofa, props from a recent photo shoot. At least Stein hoped they were props. But what arrested his attention was the life-size, three-dimensional cutout of the Espe bottle; the same icon he had seen that morning in Milli-cent Pope-Lassiter’s office.
“You’re David Hart, the photographer,” Stein declared. “I’ve seen your work.”
Hart replied a suspicious but flattered, “Really?”
“You shot the Espe box?”
“Yes,” David replied, puffing up.
“And no,” Vane added.
“But mostly yes,” David insisted. “Uncredited and unheralded. And of course unpaid.”
Lila poked Stein in the neck. “I’m still here by the way. In case you were wondering.”
Paul Vane told an extraordinary tale, the gist of it being that marketing strategy for “New Millennium” would feature a new face, one who would replace Nicholette Bradley. Of course that created a tremendous buzz. Thousands of girls were interviewed. And finally-
“Don’t tell me,” Stein interjected. “Is her name Alex?”
Lila hooted at him, “Stein, you don’t know anything about that.”
“How did you know?” Vane marveled.
“You mean he’s right? ” Lila spent the next ten minutes wondering how that could possibly be.
Vane went on. “They tried to keep it hush hush. They began shooting the national ad campaign last summer. Print ads. Billboards. TV spots. But of course no secret is safe in the ad business. Once it leaked that Alex was the next big thing, clients were lining up to hire her after her exclusive with Espe expired. Twin Peaks, the sports bra company, won the bidding. They paid her a million dollars, and the deal was she had to shave her head.”
Stein remembered he had seen those pictures. His mind, which did strange things like this, presented the proof sheet he had seen in Nicholette’s bedroom. “So she must have known she was being replaced.
“Nikki’s a darling. She helped find Alex.”
“She wasn’t irked about being replaced?”
“It’s show biz. Everyone replaces somebody.”
“Do you think you can get to the part about me before the dinner break?” David Hart pouted.
Vane smiled at his lover, who did not smile back. “Alex’s last contractual obligation to Espe was for the shoot that would create the package. Ray Ramos was the photographer. It was there that I set eyes on Ray Ramos’s magnificent, young, overworked, under-appreciated assistant for the first time.” Here Vane bowed in David Hart’s direction.
“At last.” Hart fumed.
“It was the assistant’s job to do everything. Make coffee. Load cameras. Set the lights. Process the film. After the last shot was done, Alex came to my salon. She had agreed to the deal with Twin Peaks and wanted her head shaved immediately because if she let herself think about it too long she knew she’d back out. I had just finished doing her when my darling David (of course he wasn’t my darling yet!) came bursting in. His face was the color of blanched mushrooms. He had screwed up all fifteen rolls of film that Ray Ramos had shot. The negatives were ruined. There was no shot for the box, nor for the billboard. It was a disaster of global proportion.
“David’s plan was that he would reshoot the Ray Ramos session and substitute his film for Ramos’s without anyone knowing. He knew the entire lighting setup and all the lenses and angles that Ramos had used. He had never shot before but he was sure he could do it. All I had to do was to get the world’s new top model to agree to work with an unknown photographer when all that was at stake was her entire career and the success of a ten million dollar ad campaign.
“He swore he would do anything for me in return which was a very tempting offer. And then he saw my wicker basket filled with her shorn auburn hair. I thought he was going to stroke out on the spot. His jaw froze. His eyes fluttered. He lost the power of speech. He grabbed me around the neck and begged me to perform a miracle, to make a wig out of Alex’s hair.”
“Don’t embellish,” David complained. “You always embellish.”
“My darling, I am nothing but embellishment.”
Stein stepped in to short-circuit the domestic spat. “So you made a wig for Alex out of her own hair that you had just cut off her? Is that what happened?”
“It’s technically called a fall, not a wig, because it’s her own hair, but yes. And David did the reshoot and it came out brilliantly.” Vane bowed to his protege. “More brilliantly than the original, I’m sure.”
“And then everyone started proclaiming Ray Ramos a photographic genius,” David sulked.
“Yes,” Paul Vane commiserated. “The injustice.”
The picture began to coalesce in Stein’s mind. “So you gents decided to start your own underground distribution arm? You whipped up your own private batch? You enlisted the girl at the warehouse to distract Morty Greene and diverted a few shipments of Espe bottles… How am I doing so far?”
“Stein, all this talk is getting me hungry,” Lila pouted.
“We’re done here in a second. As soon as they tell me which of them wrote the extortion letters.”
“What letters?” Vane blurted before he could stop himself.
It became clear in a flash that the extortion letters had not been part of the plan the two had agreed upon and that David Hart had written them without Vane’s approval or knowledge. The Fall of the House of Espe. Stein got the joke now. Hart knew that the hair on the label was not real. The truth-in-advertising laws were very clear now that beauty products had to be accurately represented. The notes were thinly veiled threats that Hart would blow the lid off the campaign. The lid of the Espe box was where the false hair fell. Of course David Hart knew that. He had shot the damn thing.