Screenscam

by Michael Bowen

  “You bet we have to talk, you bush-league shyster,” Eastman hissed, his nose about an inch from Rep’s. “We have to talk about helicopters blowing up less than three hundred feet away from me, and exactly what else your loony-tunes client has in mind.”

  “That’s exactly it!” Rep said excitedly. “It’s not Charlotte! I have that much figured out, but there are some blanks that you have to fill in.”

  “The only thing I plan on filling in at the moment is the space between your rectal cheeks, and I’ll be using a size ten Ferragamo loafer with tooled leather welts to do it. The one doing the talking here is going to be you, and the first thing I want to hear is the name of whoever is running you and that broad who thinks she’s Martha Grimes.”

  “That’s just the point,” Rep insisted, a hint of impatience coloring his voice. “No one is ‘running’ us. Someone is trying to make you believe that.”

  “Well they’re doing a real good job. Since early yesterday evening I’ve had a singed scalp and a lot of nervous backers who are wondering if it’s going to be bad luck to put money into one of my pictures. You know a lot more than you’ve told me so far, and when I walk out of here we’re both going to know it. So start spilling your guts.”

  Rep’s reaction to this, while understandable, was perhaps not as constructive as it might have been. He could discern a tincture of panic along with the clearly unfeigned anger in Eastman’s voice, and he supposed he would have felt the same way. Rep found it exasperating, though, when people refused to heed perfectly reasonable analyses, i.e., Rep’s; and while he had to swallow his irritation when the recalcitrants were paying clients or senior partners or Melissa, Eastman wasn’t in any of those categories.

  “This is ridiculous and it isn’t getting us anywhere,” Rep said with more than a touch of petulance. “Now here’s the protocol. We’re going to quit blustering and shouting and grabbing each other’s clothes. We’re going to sit down like two reasonably intelligent adults and have a calm, rational dialogue about this thing. I’m not saying another word until we’re agreed on that, so you might as well just back off and start impersonating a grown-up.”

  The shape of Eastman’s lips suggested that something including “sniveling little weenie” was about to come out. Before he could speak any actual words, however, the guy who’d handed him the water glass intervened.

  “Hey, chief,” he said, holding up Rep’s digital phone, still plugged into the outlet. “Think this might be worth a try? Just as a start?”

  Eastman blinked once in astonishment, then a second time in understanding as he saw panic wash across Rep’s features. At that point the rictus into which his own face had frozen relaxed into something nearly serene.

  “That idea is colossal,” Eastman said with relish. “The guy who hired you must be a genius—if I do say so myself.”

  Rep hadn’t had a particularly good look at the other guy yet. What glimpses he had managed around Eastman’s shoulders had vaguely suggested one of those fourth-cowboy-through-the-saloon-door types from fifties and sixties westerns. The guy now unplugged the phone, turned it on, and gazed lovingly at the screen.

  “Guess what, chief,” he said. “This guy has mail.”

  “Gimme,” Eastman said eagerly, leaping at the phone.

  “Hey!” Rep protested, “you can’t do that!”

  He scrambled out of bed, grabbing for the phone. He found himself immediately back in bed, his chest smarting from the guy’s casual right jab and blood seeping from throbbing nostrils as a by-product of the gentleman’s efficient left elbow. When Rep opened his eyes five or six seconds later, he saw Eastman holding the digital phone up to his ear. The other guy, now seeming a bit more like the second-cowboy-through-the-saloon-door, looked like he really wanted Rep to hop out of bed again. After deliberate and mature consideration, Rep decided not to.

  Minutes dragged by without this static tableau changing much—rather like a high concept European art film, Rep would think later. Rep himself didn’t dare move. The cowboy watching him seemed tensed in coiled, ready stillness. And Eastman just stood there with the phone to his ear, listening. He didn’t pace or scratch himself or adjust his posture, except to shift hands and ears on the phone now and then. The only thing that changed much was his expression, which changed a lot. It began with impatient interest, then progressed gradually through surprise, astonishment, incredulity, and gape-mouthed dumbfoundedness. The climax came when Eastman’s lips snapped primly closed under a pinch-faced look like Rep’s aunt used to get when she saw a girl in a mini-skirt, and a deep blush crept from the Hollywood hotshot’s jawbone to his scalp.

  Cripes, Rep thought as the clock ticked on, I hope we’re not in analog roam.

  Finally Eastman pushed what Rep fervently hoped was the END button and brought the phone down.

  “I swear,” he said in a fervent voice, “the next time some screenwriter brings me a script full of Midwesterners who don’t do anything but smoke pipes, hunt ducks, and eat apple cobbler, I’m going to drown him in the ranch dressing tureen at Spago’s. Joey, go get us three big cups of black coffee, and maybe some high-sugar pastry for the counselor here.”

  “Yeah, sure thing,” Joey said, looking and sounding far more dubious than his words. He hesitated more than once on his way out, but he finally made it through the door, leaving Rep and Eastman alone.

  “Who’s Steve?” Eastman asked.

  “Probably Steve Finneman, the senior partner at my firm,” Rep said as Eastman nodded.

  “He left a message for you. He said that Tempus-Caveator Corp. has launched a takeover bid for one of your firm’s big clients. He also said that Charlotte Buchanan has suddenly gone missing and has to be found quick.”

  “Blitz my writs,” Rep said to an Eastman momentarily baffled by this lawyerly ejaculation. “Give me that thing. I have to talk to Steve right now.”

  “You may want to hear some more before you call him,” Eastman said. “Most of what I listened to was from your wife. She’s had herself quite a little twelve hours or so.”

  “What do you mean?” Rep asked urgently.

  “This is going to take a while,” Eastman said. “I’ll give it to you while you’re dressing and freshening up.”

  Not quite half an hour later, Eastman and Rep had not only exchanged every scrap of relevant information they each possessed but had consumed between them thirty-two ounces of coffee and two cinnamon rolls larger than some eastern states. Rep had found time between mouthfuls to call Finneman and share what clues he had to Charlotte Buchanan’s whereabouts. He had also explained to Eastman the theory that had formed itself spontaneously in his mind while he was driving to Oshkosh—a theory that, as he pointed out with some satisfaction to Eastman, the information from Melissa and Finneman backed up.

  “Melissa I can see,” Eastman conceded. “But why Finneman? What do Tavistock’s corporate problems have to do with this?”

  “The source of all the problems—namely, Tempus-Caveator. What I think has people doing nasty things to you right now is that you’re shopping a project about Tempus-Caveator tanking Red Guard! You’re accusing T-C of sinking an epic film it suddenly found itself owning so that a grateful Chinese government would shut off information damaging to the incumbent administration, with the payoff for Tempus-Caveator being a critical antitrust pass from that same administration. Charlotte Buchanan moves into your orbit, and suddenly her dad’s company has trouble with Tempus-Caveator too. Do you think it’s just coincidence?”

  “An elephant stomping through the savanna crushes a lot of earthworms in five years,” Eastman said, shrugging. “That doesn’t mean one earthworm has anything to do with another one. Charlotte Buchanan is making problems for me, so if you’re right Tempus-Caveator should be helping her, not hurting her. Give me a logical reason why T-C’s attack on me should make it want to take over Tavistock.”

  “It doesn’t come to me right away,” Rep admitted.
“How did Tempus-Caveator kill Red Guard!? Is all that stuff in your treatment about hacking into computers to fiddle the Price-Waterhouse certified count really true?”

  “That’s speculation,” Eastman said. “The truth is I don’t know how, I just know what. They did everything they could to kill the movie, including making sure it came up empty on Oscar night. But how they brought it off, aside from the scheduling games I already told you about, I don’t know.”

  “Okay, so we have to work on that one,” Rep said. “Still, by my count there are now something like seven reasons why Charlotte Buchanan isn’t the one who blew up your helicopter. With number seven being, whatever else you might think about her, it’s hard to see her carrying water for Tempus-Caveator.”

  He smiled with the quiet, practiced confidence that his impeccable reasoning justified. The smile that Eastman offered Rep was just as quiet and just as confident, but not quite as friendly, somehow.

  “That’s very interesting,” he said. “But I can think of one reason why you’re totally full of it.”

  “Huh? What are you talking about?”

  “Her e-mail to you. She knew I’m due in northern California Sunday night to prospect for cash. How did she know that? She wanted to get you out of Indianapolis over the weekend when the takeover battle started. Why? Just an interesting coincidence?”

  “I think I can get you answers to those questions, actually, but it might take a little time,” Rep said, hoping he could improvise as furiously as he was bluffing.

  “Well I want to hear this, it ought to be good,” Eastman said, glancing at his watch. “But I’ll tell you what, you’re going to have to get it done by five o’clock this afternoon, because that’s when I have to drive to the airport to pick up Selding, who’s flying in from L.A. with his laptop full of key information about these Silicon Valley money guys.”

  With Eastman’s words, a tidy little Gestalt whole popped fully formed into Rep’s consciousness. It was a model of craftsmanlike perfection, every mortise dovetailing perfectly into the corresponding tenon, every dowel countersunk into its apertures in a model of flawless joining, every metaphor unmixed and apropos. Rep didn’t have time to analyze it; all he could do was go with it.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Rep said, pointing his finger at Eastman and feeling a rush like he hadn’t had since he’d thrown two blue chips at three aces showing with red cards up and black ones down in his own hand. “I’ll tell you what. Give me one more piece of information, and before you leave for Pomona I won’t just explain it to you, I’ll prove it to you.”

  “I’ve been bluffed by experts, son,” Eastman said, grinning wickedly. “You’re on.”

  Chapter 14

  The majestically arcing faceted glass ceiling and the clean architectural lines defined in light blue and industrial gray were busily trying to make Jerry Selding think he was someplace halfway civilized. He wasn’t fooled, though. No matter how much United Airlines had tarted the place up, it was still Terminal 1 at O’Hare International Airport, and Selding still hated it.

  As he tramped out of that terminal and began in earnest his epic, marathon, Trail of Tears trek to Terminal 4, Selding tried to avoid thinking about how many times he’d been through O’Hare in the past two years and how many times he’d be here in the next two. You can fly over the country from L.A. without hitting Chicago, but it seemed to Selding that whenever you flew around inside the country you had to touch down at O’Hare at some point along the way.

  The burden that had already started a nagging little ache in the back of his right shoulder did nothing to improve his mood. Selding had checked his Travelpro bag all the way through to Oshkosh, but ever since leaving the storage lockers he’d been lugging his laptop—a Dell Latitude Pentium II in a massive black leather case bristling with zippers and flaps. It was big and dorky by Beverly Hills’ elegant standards, but the price was right: he’d neglected to return it to Human Resources when Tavistock Ltd. pink-slipped him, and he’d just kept on using it since. Not that that made him any happier about toting the thing. In his view, laptops (along with portable phones and pagers) were fin de siècle gray flannel suits, badges of conformity—and Selding was as tied to his as any of the sales reps or middle managers or CPAs sharing the endless corridor with him were to theirs.

  Finally he found himself approaching the Terminal 4 security area. He always thought of the same, limp joke as he neared the end of mind-numbing hikes like this: If I just kept walking a little longer, I could skip the plane and reach Oshkosh on foot. A woman hustled past him, in such a hurry that he checked his watch to be sure he wasn’t running late himself. He wasn’t, of course. People just seemed naturally to pick up their pace when they got this close, as if it were terribly important to spend an extra two minutes in the departure lounge instead of idling them away in the line to the x-ray machine.

  Above such mindless herd instincts himself, Selding sauntered wearily into line. He put his laptop on the conveyer belt, stepped to the metal detector, and emptied keys and change from his pockets into a Tupperware bowl. He prepared to step between the magnetic sensors that would verify he was unarmed.

  “Excuse me, sir,” the guard at the table said, stopping him in mid-pace. “Is this pipe-cleaning tool yours?”

  Selding glanced up. Did anyone under sixty actually smoke pipes anymore? The woman was holding a roach clip, and she was doing it with a knowing glint in her eye. Pipe-cleaning tool, right. She knew what it was as well as he did.

  “No, of course not,” Selding snapped. Cripes, I couldn’t possibly have done something that stupid, could I? He took a deep breath, and spoke with a bit more control. “No, it isn’t mine.”

  “One of the other passengers saw it on the floor and thought you might have dropped it,” the woman said, shrugging and adopting a don’t-blame-me expression. She set the implement down on the table. “Pass on through.”

  He walked without incident through the metal detector and retrieved the black leather laptop bag now at the secure end of the conveyor belt. His gate was one of eight grouped together on a concourse off of Terminal 4’s main corridor—second-rate, low-service gates for affiliated, regional carriers. He’d be flying in a plane with propellers instead of jets, but at least Eastman wouldn’t be at the controls.

  He figured he had a good twenty minutes before they’d start boarding and he wanted to go over the opening scene storyboard for Every Sixteen Minutes one more time, so he found a chair and pulled the laptop out of its case. There wasn’t an outlet in sight, of course, and even if he’d spotted one it probably wouldn’t have been hot. Airports in the age of portable electronics had gotten cagey about making electricity too accessible in departure lounges, he’d noticed. He guessed that they didn’t want passengers tripping over proliferating mares’ nests of power cords. Selding figured it wouldn’t be a problem, though. The battery still ought to have some muscle left.

  He pushed the ON button. Nothing happened. So much for that theory. He tried again. Nothing. Not the slightest pulse of green light or the hint of a valiant beep.

  Disgustedly, he snapped the lid shut. The battery probably wasn’t charging back up all the way anymore, which meant this was the beginning of the end for it. A new one would cost $250 or more, and he bet he’d have to go to the computer equivalent of an antique store to find one.

  He surveyed the departure lounge again, in a more determined search for a functional outlet. Five minutes and several irritated looks from fellow passengers were enough to convince him that the only possibility was set low in a wall around the far corner of the lounge. To get to it he’d have to shift a four-seat bench, and to do that he’d have to induce movement from a beefy Chicago Blackhawks fan who looked like he didn’t care much for guys with earrings. And of course if he managed all that he still might find out that the thing wasn’t supplying current anyway. He was on the verge of surrendering unconditionally to these formidable obstacles when he heard a wom
an’s voice behind him, trying to get his attention.

  “Uh, yo,” he said, turning around. The lady was short and old—late twenties anyway, maybe early thirties—with dead ordinary brown hair. Her best feature was lively green eyes. Her shape was okay, he guessed, but it wouldn’t have gotten a second glance on the coast. On the other hand, she had at least avoided that supermodel skinniness that was so common in California these days and that frankly tended to creep Selding out. (He wouldn’t say it out loud to anyone, but he thought he was a fairly normal guy and his idea of a sexy woman didn’t involve something that looked more like an anorexic adolescent male.)

  “You looked like you might be looking for a place to fire up your computer,” she said. She raised her own laptop case slightly in a vaguely empathetic gesture. “There’s a Northwest Airlines Admirals Club room between gates eight and ten with work carrels, power strips and data ports. I’ve just come from there. If you’re really desperate, you can come down with me and I can sign you in as my guest.”

  What a great pick-up line! Selding thought. The third millennium way to hit on perfect strangers! It was tempting, in a way, especially if she was also going to Oshkosh. But he figured he wasn’t ready for that level of commitment with someone who could have babysat for him.

  “That’s really nice of you,” he said with the mellow, coastal warmth his voice had acquired since his relocation. “But I don’t think I’ll have time to get there and back before they start boarding. Thanks anyway, though.”

  “Sure,” the lady said.

  O’Hare to Oshkosh was thirty cramped, unpleasant minutes of actual air time. Selding hated every second of it. It was with vast relief that he pulled his laptop out of the overhead compartment and ambled across the tarmac to Oshkosh’s tidy little terminal building. He never thought he’d be so glad to see Eastman in his life.

  Eastman was all smiles, so friendly and palsy-walsy that Selding wondered for a moment if he were about to be fired. He decided instead that Eastman was just softening him up for some other really stinky job he had in mind.