“I did.”
“Good. And the name and agent of anyone you sent the treatment to who didn’t also get the manuscript.”
“Tall order.”
“Before you start filling that order, though, tell me about Aaron Eastman.”
“Producer of In Contemplation of Death,” Mixler shrugged. “Point West is his personal vehicle, no question. Let’s see, what else? Had a nine-figure epic several years ago that was supposed to be Oscar-bait and only drew one nomination, for Best Song in a Movie Made by White Guys About China or something. That’s about it.”
“Did you pitch And Done to Others’ Harm to him?”
“If I had I would’ve had the brains to mention it before,” Mixler said irritably. “Apparently you didn’t hear me just now. Around the time I was pushing Done, Eastman’s last big wrap was a movie that cost a hundred-million plus before they bought the first newspaper ad. I would’ve been lucky to pitch Charlotte’s story to Eastman’s third assistant go-fer.”
“Did you ever pitch anything to him?” Rep pressed.
“‘Ever’ is a long time. Let’s see, must’ve, I guess. Years ago I think he gave me five minutes to tout a biopic on Rosa Luxemburg. She was a commie, but we would’ve soft-pedaled that part and gone with the costume drama visual stuff: arrested by the czar’s police while she was in bed with her lover; got laid more often than a Clinton intern; always carried a gun because half the comrades wanted to kill her over her politics and the other half wanted to nail her for her love life; goes on trial for sedition in Germany the day World War I starts; tries to overthrow the German government after the war, captured in bloody street fighting, then assassinated by the Freikorps. Plus you’ve got all kinds of colorful history in the background—the Dreyfus Affair in France, Paris in the belle époque, troops breaking strikes, duels every fifteen minutes, bolsheviks behaving badly, guys getting assassinated in cafes, brawls and riots every time you turn around, the whole thing.”
“I don’t remember seeing the movie, so the pitch must not have gone well,” Rep prompted.
“He gave me my five minutes,” Mixler said. “Then he leaned back in his chair and said, ‘Do you think we can get Jennifer Aniston for Rosa?’”
“From Friends?” Deltrediche demanded in astonishment.
“Right. That was how he said no.”
“So he’s a jerk,” Rep said. “Is he a thief?”
“Not that I know of. No more than anyone else in Hollywood.”
The waiter appeared with their food.
“Now you can start writing,” Rep said.
“Between bites,” Mixler said.
Forty-five minutes later, as the waiter cleared post-dinner coffee and Deltrediche and Mixler took their leave, Rep gathered the potentially precious scraps of yellow paper they had given him and began studying them. Something about the way Buchanan scraped her chair when they were finally alone told him that she was about to speak. He looked up.
“Would you like the hostess to give you a spanking?” she asked, her voice a trifle huskier than usual. “I’ll ask her, if you want me to. You won’t have to say a word. Open hand or paddle. Out here in public, if that’s what floats your boat, or behind that beaded curtain by the hostess desk.”
“Uh, no, thanks, actually.”
“Don’t bother telling me the idea doesn’t turn you on. I know it does.”
It turned him on all right. In fifteen years of technicolor fantasies Rep had been over the knees of pop icons from Meg Ryan to Sean Young to Cameron Diaz to Julia Roberts.
“I don’t think your offer calls for comment one way or the other,” he said with as much dignity as he could muster.
“Suit yourself,” Buchanan said, shrugging. “It doesn’t bother me one way or the other. I just thought you might be curious about how the real thing matches up with your fantasies.”
Curious doesn’t come close, Rep thought.
“I’m curious about party drugs like Ecstasy,” Rep said, “but I’ve never done any.”
“Why not?”
“I draw lines.”
“Where?” Buchanan asked.
“This side of cheating. Fantasizing is on one side. Actually engaging in a sex act with someone other than my wife would be on the other.” Rep managed to keep his voice calm and clinical. He deliberately chose stilted, bloodless, lawyerly words.
“A lot of people might say that that’s a pretty fine distinction.”
“Whenever you draw a line you’ll have cases close to the line on each side, and they won’t be very different,” Rep shrugged. “But you still have to draw the line.”
“You’re coming off as super high-minded, talking like that. But even though you put your fantasies on the okay side of the line, I’ll bet you hide them from your wife.”
“That isn’t really any of your business, is it?”
He didn’t hide it from Melissa, actually. “Hide” wasn’t quite the right word. He knew from early and clumsy overtures that she didn’t share his fascination, that she could never be more than a mildly disgusted good sport about spanking. So he didn’t bring it up at all anymore. But he didn’t call that hiding it, as if he were conducting some kind of backstreet affair. He treated his esoteric interest the same way Melissa treated her taste for marijuana.
“You’re right,” Buchanan said in response to his rebuke. “It isn’t any of my business. I’m sorry.”
What you should be sorry about is blackmail, not clumsy questions, Rep thought.
“No offense,” Rep said.
“I’m not trying to blackmail you,” Buchanan said then, “I’m just taking out motivational insurance. I’ve told you what this claim means to me. I don’t want you just mailing it in.”
“Did tonight look to you like mailing it in?” Rep asked.
“You were energetic and well prepared,” Buchanan said. “But tell me something: What did we really accomplish?”
It would have been child’s play to stall her, and he was tempted to do exactly that. Instead, almost impulsively, he took a full-sized page of legal paper out of his inside coat pocket, unfolded it, and spread it on the table between them. On a line two spaces below the center of the page he had printed three names:
JAMES CRONIN MORRIE BRISTOL DAVID ALBERS
Three spaces above these names he had printed DUNSTON RIVIERA. Dotted lines connected Dunston Riviera to Cronin and Bristol.
“These are the three people who got screenplay credits for In Contemplation of Death,” he said, tapping the lower names with his pen point.
“I know. Who’s Dunston Riviera?”
“Not who, what. Dunston Riviera is an agency that has both Cronin and Bristol as clients.”
“Who’s Albers’ agent?”
“We’re not sure yet. Now, it’s obviously going to take time to analyze these new data from Deltrediche and Mixler in detail, but let’s do a quick once-over and see if by some wild chance we’ve accomplished something tonight.”
Rep shuffled the pages that Deltrediche and Mixler had covered with scribbling. For three minutes he referred to them while making notes on his own legal page. When he was through, the big page looked like this:
“The dashed lines mean we know your story was passed from one person to the next,” he explained. “The dotted lines mean it could have been because there’s a natural relationship, but we don’t know yet.”
“And you’re saying Davidof is both the Hollywood contact of a senior editor at Back Door Press and one of the guys that Bernie Mixler showed the story to on his own.”
“Deltrediche and Mixler said that, independently, and without any chance to collaborate. That may mean absolutely nothing. But it is very interesting that Davidof is also a client of Dunston Riviera. Having three writers on one screenplay is a bad sign. It often means that the first script ran into trouble.”
“So maybe Dunston Riviera called in Bristol to rescue Cronin or vi
ce-versa, and he needed some help in a hurry, and Davidof gave it to him in the form of my story.”
“Maybe. Or maybe not. But that’s what we accomplished tonight. We came up with some questions to ask that are a lot more focused than the ones we had before.”
“Okay,” Buchanan said with what Rep took to be a concessionary expulsion of breath. “You’re not mailing it in. But how close are we to filing a complaint in court?”
“I have no idea. What we’re a lot closer to is drafting a letter to the general counsel for Point West Productions.”
“A letter saying what?”
“That information which has come to our attention and which we believe to be reliable suggests that his or her client is in serious trouble; that we would like some voluntary cooperation in investigating the matter in an effort to resolve these nagging questions without filing suit; and that in the meantime we demand that all relevant documents, floppies, e-mails, recordings, pixels and anything else pertinent to In Contemplation of Death be preserved.”
“Won’t that kind of letter have exactly the opposite effect? Won’t they start deleting stuff from their hard drives and shredding first drafts and destroying evidence?”
Rep’s eyes glowed at the prospect. For the first time that night he was truly happy.
“When you get back to your room tonight,” he told his client fervently, “kneel down and pray that Point West Productions starts deleting hard-drive entries, shredding documents, and destroying evidence.”
***
In his own room at the Hilton Midtown half an hour later, Rep kicked himself for overplaying his hand. The Davidof connection didn’t have to mean a blessed thing, but he’d been so anxious to impress Buchanan that he’d let his exuberance run away with his judgment. He’d been so giddy that he’d almost walked out of the restaurant without his laptop, which Buchanan had had to retrieve for him. Now he had her up there with him and without a net.
He hooked his laptop up to the dataport on his phone and checked his e-mails. Then he disconnected the laptop and dialed his own office number to collect his voice-mail messages. They were routine, until the last one.
“Hey, Rep, Paul Mulcahy getting back to you,” the recorded voice on the last message said. Mulcahy was a law school classmate, practicing entertainment law in Los Angeles. “I don’t want to get into this in a recorded message, but call me right away, okay? Go ahead and use my home number if you have to.”
Rep didn’t have to, because Mulcahy was still at his desk in lotus land at seven-twenty, Pacific Daylight Time.
“That was a very provocative message,” Rep said.
“I didn’t mean it as a tease, because I don’t really have any hard information for you,” Mulcahy said. “But there’s something you might want to know before you start messing around with Aaron Eastman and Point West. I don’t think he’s any boy scout. You’re not the first guy to start asking questions about him recently. I have no idea what it is, but he’s in something heavy with someone.”
“What kind of questions are the other people asking?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. All kinds of off-the-wall stuff, from what little echoes came to me. All I’d bet on is that he’s got something bigger than alimony and royalty disputes on his mind right now.”
“Is Point West in financial trouble?”
“No idea. I have absolutely no clue what this is all about. I just don’t know if I’d want to get mixed up with him right at this point in time.”
“Thanks,” Rep said. “Talk to you again soon.”
He hung up. He wiped his forehead. He swiped moist palms on his pants. Then he turned his laptop back on and opened a new document. With the tentative, jab-style of typing he always used, he started drafting:
[NAME]
General Counsel
Point West Productions
[ADDRESS]
Re: In Contemplation of Death
Dear __________:
This firm represents Charlotte Buchanan, the author of And Done to Others’ Harm (St. Philomena Press 1997). Information that has come to our attention and that we believe to be reliable leads us to believe that the recent Point West production In Contemplation of Death borrowed significantly in theme, characterization, and plot line from Ms. Buchanan’s novel.
He paused for a moment. He took a deep breath. Then he started typing much more quickly.
Chapter 6
By Wednesday, eight days after his initial conference with Charlotte Buchanan in Chip Arundel’s office, Rep’s mood had just about returned to its customary equilibrium and placid contentment. His nastygram to Point West had gone out Tuesday, putting the ball in the bad guys’ court until at least sometime next week. He’d send a message to Mixler later in the day, reminding him that he still owed Rep a copy of the movie treatment for And Done to Others’ Harm. And he’d told Buchanan to come up with a copy of the manuscript that Deltrediche had used for her multiple submissions. That figured to keep her busy for a few more days, anyway.
All in all, Rep didn’t see any reason why he couldn’t spend the rest of this week practicing real law instead of worrying about sullen heiresses and second-rate mysteries. His gait as he passed his secretary’s desk at 8:40 A.M. was his customary purposeful stride rather than the uncertain shuffle he’d caught himself lapsing into recently.
“Debbie, if the trademark samples from Cremona Pizza don’t come in with this morning’s Federal Express delivery, please remind me to rattle their cage about it,” he told the efficient young woman.
“I think the messengers brought it by on the early morning run,” she called after him. “They put a package on your chair. It was damp, so I put some ABA Journals under it.”
“Damp?” Rep muttered jauntily. “They didn’t send whole pizzas instead of just the labels, did they? This may turn into a value-billing situation.”
The brown carton on his chair was indeed wet at the edges and near sodden on the bottom. Not to mention more than a little ripe. As soon as he picked it up, Rep knew it hadn’t come from Cremona Pizza. Whoever sent this had used ordinary mail, and hadn’t included a return address.
The box was tough, with no perforations or other invitations to easy opening. When Rep finally got the end flap pulled off and began to work the contents out, his first thought was, Why is some idiot sending me beef tenderloin? Quickly, though, he realized that the thick, pinkish-gray, longish piece of meat with one end curled downward wasn’t beef tenderloin. A dozen more grisly possibilities occurred to him in the few seconds before he identified it.
It was tongue. Calve’s tongue, probably. Accompanying it, looped around each end and with a double handle connecting the loops, was a cat’s cradle of twine. He had figured out the grotesque message even before he read the letters crudely cut and pasted on the scrap of paper that fell out of the box last: HOLD YOUR TONGUE.
My client isn’t neurotic after all, Rep thought. Neurotic isn’t within a time-zone of what my client is. My client is nuts. Bananas. Crackers. My client is marsh-loon crazy.
Rep had gotten a real death threat once in his career. It had come from an entrepreneur in Terre Haute who thought that he could use well known trademarks if he just put them on cigarette lighters and barbecue aprons instead of products like those the trademark owners actually sold. Rep had explained the unpleasant truth, with its implication that once Rep unleashed the pit bulls in the Litigation Department the man’s company and most of his personal worth would become the property of Rep’s clients.
“Your clients will never see a penny except from the fire insurance,” the entrepreneur had assured Rep with a kind of fierce solemnity. “And you won’t live to collect your fee, much less enjoy it.”
Rep hadn’t had the slightest doubt that that threat was real. Turning his ignition key that evening and for several evenings afterward, he’d wondered for a nanosecond whether his ideas would be separated from his habits before he got the car in
reverse.
This hold-your-tongue stuff, on the other hand, screamed phony. A bad guy seriously interested in scaring Rep wouldn’t have come up something lame and literary. Like the Terre Haute entrepreneur, he’d take the direct and unambiguous approach. The garbage in the damp brown envelope was the kind of thing someone who’d seen too many movies and read too many hard-boiled private eye novels would dream up.
Charlotte Buchanan, in other words. He looked at the postmark on the envelope: New York, Tuesday morning. Charlotte Buchanan had concocted this inane prop and mailed it to Rep to reinforce his belief in her claim. Point West wouldn’t try to warn him off unless it were guilty, so Buchanan had tried to make Point West look guilty by confecting a childish threat that she apparently thought Rep would be dumb enough to blame on Aaron Eastman’s production company.
Even as he fetched an oversized envelope and sealed this mess inside of it, Rep knew the next four things he should do, and in what order. He ought to call Steve Finneman and tell him that he’d be getting a confidential memo later in the day about a potentially delicate situation. Then he ought to dictate the memo. Then he should call the postal inspector or the police, maybe both, and suggest that someone with a badge start dusting for fingerprints and interviewing Big Apple butchers.
After he’d done all of that, he ought to tell Miss Buchanan to find herself a new lawyer because she and Rep now had, to say it politely, a material conflict of interest.
He faced the implications of doing this for thirty-eight manly seconds before he flinched. He would be saying that the daughter of a major client’s CEO was either a criminal or a head-case. And as sure as he was that Charlotte Buchanan had sent the package, his certainty owed more to intuition than evidence. This stunt was of a piece with the obsessive fervor that glowed in Buchanan’s eyes and rasped in her voice and breathed through her prose—but hardheaded lawyers would dismiss that kind of stuff as two steps below astrology.
Screenscam Page 4