by M. M. Mayle
“Yeah, and I catch what you’re makin’ of this—that the girlfriend didn’t know who the subject was or she woulda held me up for more money.”
“Make it clear you’re doing her a favor to take this shit off her hands. Buy everything she’s got, make sure she’s not holding out on you, and don’t pay a cent more than five dollars a copy or she will start wondering who the subject is. I’ll cover your costs plus ten percent and—”
“Twenty percent.”
“Shut up and listen. I am your one and only hope for ever going legit, as you put it. Work with me on this and I’ll see that you get your chance. I’ll fucking guarantee your chance.”
“I’ll need an advance and exclusive rights.”
Nate hears echoes of the deal struck with Cliff Grant when Colin resorted to that source to get a lead on Aurora’s whereabouts. And look how that turned out.
“Not yet, you don’t. You’re covered for the porn purchase plus the ten percent finder’s fee, but until there’s more to go on than you’ve brought today, there’s no big story here.”
“Oh puh-leeez. Who d’ya think you’re messin’ with anyway? I saw your inside lights go on when I mentioned the drug match, and you were freakin’ spellbound by the marking on the back of the porn pic. Tell me you haven’t seen it before and aren’t makin’ deductions right and left even as we speak. Makin’ me wonder what’s your interest in all this? What are you out to prove, and what’re you expectin’ to gain?”
Broken capillaries on Brownie’s nose deepen in color as he stresses his justifiable point. But no way in hell will Nate deliver a mission statement predicated on a two-and-a-half-year-old occurrence and an ongoing desire to find peace of mind.
“Are we good?” he says as though he were not in the crosshairs of the reporter’s reasonable right to know, and places a few bills on the table next to the coffee and bagel that just arrived.
“You gonna leave that?” Brownie indicates the coffee and bagel as though no other question had been asked.
“Knock yourself out.” Nate slides out of the booth and gets to his feet.
“Till next time.” Brownie releases a humorless laugh and burlesques a toast with a coffee cup raised on high. “And there will be one.”
The full relapse hits him somewhere in Jersey City, where he’s speeding along the Turnpike as though he could outrun these new reasons to believe anything is possible. He reverts to weaving threads of coincidence and similarity into whole cloth while traversing the Holland Tunnel. On a northbound avenue in Manhattan, Nate resurrects a few of the more farfetched theories resulting from his undercover sweep of L.A., and they don’t seem quite so implausible in light of the newly forged link between Lester and Kaplan. He approaches home, visualizing a graphic of the kind Amanda would utilize to illustrate a nexus—if one can be made to exist—and sees himself stepping onto firmer ground.
At home, he assembles a fresh pad of paper, a pair of pencils, a beer, and a cordless phone on the breakfast table. A little before five p.m. GMT, he dials Amanda’s work number and clicks off when the call goes to machine. Next he tries her number at the Grosvenor House. No luck there, either. Impetus weakens, enthusiasm wanes. As a last resort, he dials the number for her service without any expectations, great or small. He’s in neutral territory by the time Amanda returns his call a half hour later, then filled with chagrin when she reminds him it’s Sunday—Easter Sunday, a detail he’d overlooked altogether—and lets him know she’s at a social gathering.
She refuses his offer to postpone the update. “Oddly enough, we were just talking about you, so you’re really not interrupting anything.”
“Talking about me in what regard?” he says, taking for granted she’s with other members of David Sebastian’s London staff or David himself.
“I should let Laurel answer that. She’s the one who brought up the possibility of your—”
“Laurel? Where are you?”
“I’m at Colin’s estate in Kent, I’m at Terra Firma. Don’t you just love the name? Hold on, I’ll get Laurel.”
He’d rather hang up than be caught in unauthorized contact with Laurel Chandler on a line owned and eavesdroppable by Colin Elliot. Laurel may have similar concerns because she comes on the line sounding as tentative as he’s ever heard her. She states her qualms up front like a disclaimer. But it’s not Colin’s displeasure she’s afraid of incurring, it’s the potential for insult that’s worrying her when she asks if he would consider becoming her financial advisor.
“If you agree, I’ll eventually tell Colin I’ve enlisted your professional help, but not right away. Not while he’s preoccupied with getting the band back together and getting ready for the memorial concert and the tour.”
Nate’s immediate priority is learning where Colin is as they speak. Upon being assured that Colin is far out of earshot, off on one last Easter egg hunt with the children, he cautions Laurel to first of all, stop thinking that her request could be heard as an insult.
“If anything, I’m flattered that you’ve asked. Second of all, don’t wait too long to tell Colin. You know as well as I that he has zero tolerance for being shielded.”
“I do indeed. Point well taken. I’ll tell him as soon as seems reasonable. And I cannot thank you enough. Quite a load off my mind. We can be in touch by phone and fax for the preliminaries, then I’d like to meet in person when final decisions are ready to be made. Is the third week of the month too soon—when you’re here for the memorial concert?”
“I wasn’t planning to attend.”
“Well, now you have good reason to attend and you can write it off as a business trip.” She laughs, and in that laughter he hears a lightheartedness that never quite came to the surface when she was only official biographer.
“I’ll look into it. If the date doesn’t work out, I’ll try to clear something for soon after. Meanwhile, I can have your real property evaluated in case you decide to liquidate, and I’m sure I can arrange a private sale for your car unless it’s already spoken for.”
“No, no, no, you don’t have to do that. Now I feel as though I’ve asked you to take on the job of caretaker and that’s not at all what I had in mind. Is it any damn wonder I was afraid of seeming insulting?”
“Trust me, you’re not. It’s the least I can do for you—for having taken Colin off my hands.”
There’s a slightly worrisome pause—as though Laurel is unsure if he’s capable of lightheartedness—until she transmits more of the wonderfully infectious laughter that has him revved up again when Amanda comes back on the line.
“I’m alone now,” Amanda says, and they quickly slip into the easy intimacy that’s characterized the many calls exchanged since she left the States. With minimal preamble, he fills her in on what Brownie Yates had to say and she responds exactly as he hoped she would—with a premise he hadn’t yet considered
She offers her version of network theory, positing that if a link has been forged between Cliff Grant and Sid Kaplan via the porn connection, and another link created between Gibby Lester and Kaplan by way of the drug match, then a join between Lester and Grant can’t be more than a few steps away.
“But it’s hard to imagine you—we—are alone in thinking these homicides are related. Some cop somewhere has to be working that angle, and will have to go on working it until somebody steps forward with info that’ll tie it all together. Don’t you think?”
Can this be the slip of a girl who was having a crisis of confidence only five days ago? In the privacy of his kitchen, Nate cracks an indulgent smile and voices his agreement. He switches to another topic—one less apt to offer opportunities for innuendo—and initiates a run-through of her several accomplishments to date. That uses up a quarter-hour and most of the subject matter deemed acceptable between them.
“I miss you” is what he wants to say despite her never having occupied a large enough space in his life to make that believable. He’d like to say that he feels like a castaway on a d
esert island, despite having privately interfaced with at least a hundred different people during the last two days alone, and mingled anonymously with hundreds more anytime he was out in public. But that wouldn’t ring true, either. Not at this stage in the game. So he says an impersonal goodbye, makes a vague promise to talk again soon, and leaves it at that.
FOURTEEN
Early afternoon, April 26, 1987
“Fix me,” Simon says, as he often does when something’s wanting. This time he’s only asking for release from the booster chair now that lunch is finished, but there have been times when the same plea could seem to be addressing what’s wanting at his core—the indefinable lack that may not be fixable.
Laurel lifts him up and kisses him, then resists the temptation to carry him upstairs instead of allowing him to climb on his own. She resists the temptation to rock him before he’s settled for a nap; she does, however, stay with him while he drifts off, and indulges in a little drifting herself.
A week has passed since Amanda’s Easter Sunday visit—a week when nothing’s occurred that would alter Laurel’s suspicion that her former assistant and Colin’s former manager are allied in more than a casual way. Romance is not beyond the realm of possibility, but if that were the case, would not one or the other have admitted as much in the recent conversations she’s had with each?
Just yesterday, Amanda had the perfect opportunity to share a confidence after they exhausted the scheduled topics during a regular morning update. But all she wanted to talk about was the need for heightened security now that Colin and the Verge reunion have supplanted Rayce Vaughn’s controversial death as front page news. And just the day before, Nate was stingy with small talk at the end of his regular update. His only extraneous comments alerted her to a possible connection between the murders of Cliff Grant, Gibby Lester, and the opportunistic photographer Colin was briefly accused of dispatching.
Why Nate felt that information important enough to relay remains a mystery. If she was supposed to hear something sinister in his remarks, she didn’t; she heard only that his proclivity for worrywarting was still vigorous and had infected Amanda.
Simon’s fast asleep now, so she’s out of excuses for delaying her return to the business of evaluating the several financial proposals Nate has faxed to her so far. And she has no good excuse for further delaying a decision regarding Colin’s stalled biography.
She hesitates at the door to the office, surprised to see Colin sitting at the desk she planned to use. Her mouth is open to say so; her expression says she thought he would be in the studio, rehearsing for the sixth day in a row.
Colin scowls at her through a pair of wire rimmed eyeglasses she hasn’t seen before. “Good,” he says, “I won’t have to go looking for you.”
He brushes aside a stack of opened envelopes and a commercial size check book, and takes up a sheaf of papers she recognizes as a week’s worth of electronic communications from Nate—the very proposals she was planning to review.
“Tiresome this is, this being informed by fax every time someone near or dear sets out to deceive me. As Amanda would say—you are so busted.”
“Sorry?” she says and backs off a step.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. Don’t pretend you weren’t counting on me to be elsewhere when you left these faxes scattered about.”
Nate’s warning flashes through her mind. Not the implied one about a possible whackjob on the loose; it’s the one about full and immediate disclosure to Colin of her arrangement with Nate that comes to the fore. Of old habit, she puts the freestanding desk between them, but that’s as far as old habit goes because she has nothing to say for herself at the moment.
“I’ve looked at these, I know what they represent.” Colin brandishes the evidence as though he’s about to swat a wasp with a rolled up newspaper. “I do recognize your need for someone to manage your affairs in the States, but bleedin’ hell, did it have to be Nate Isaacs?”
She gulps. “It did.”
“You willing to say why?”
“Why?” She struggles for her bearings. “Why? . . . Because while you were incapacitated he had the opportunity to screw you over—big time, as Amanda would say—and he didn’t. And because he went against your express wishes and had me investigated rather than see you fall prey to a gold digger or worse. Because he ultimately pointed me in the right direction, which was straight at you. Because I trust him . . . and so should you. And I should mention that if I wanted to conceal my association with him, I wouldn’t have asked him to fax me here—here where you could so readily come across the evidence.”
“You nevertheless withheld information from me.”
“I procrastinated telling you, that’s all. You already have too much on your mind.”
“You were sparing me, then. Protecting me.”
“If I was protecting anyone it was myself.”
“Because you figured we’d get into a row over it.”
She nods.
He sighs. “I’m gonna disappoint you, actually. I think you made the right choice in Nate and I won’t get in the way unless he oversteps the bounds. If he tries to insert himself into any of my affairs—that I won’t accept. Okay?”
“Very well,” she says, thereby eliminating the need to share Nate’s exaggerated concern about the three homicides.
Colin invites her to pull up the only other chair in the room— an armless swivel that’s seen better days—and removes the eyeglasses that did nothing to diminish his appeal. Once she’s seated, he explains that he came to the office with the sole intention of reconciling household accounts and got distracted with list-making before he noticed the faxes. He hands her a page of notes that translate into a rough game plan for an August wedding. Friday, August 14, 1987, to be exact; approximately four months from now and approximately four weeks from the end of the European tour.
“Is that date acceptable or will astrologers have to be consulted?” Colin says.
He warms her with one of those full-wattage smiles she used to have to work so hard to resist. She looks away rather than try to match it, and she can’t think why. And she doesn’t answer right away, even though there’s no good reason not to accept the date.
They don’t have to book a hall, after all. Or a band, for that matter. With a little outside help, the kitchen staff could probably handle most of the catering needs; gardens at peak splendor could provide nearly anything a florist might suggest. The fall term wouldn’t yet have begun, so her brothers and sister would be free to attend. Colin’s sister certainly wouldn’t need more than three months notice to arrange a trip from Australia, and Rachel certainly wouldn’t object to expediting a ceremony she’s so actively encouraged. The guest list would comprise members of a social tier seldom locked into traditional time constraints, and there wouldn’t be any budgetary constraints to slow things down.
The only iffy proposition, as underlined in his notes, is securing a proper venue for the ceremony, and that would have to be done right away. She frowns over the entry and he quickly points out the advantage in requesting a Friday booking when Saturday is the most popular day for weddings.
“And there are a great many suitable churches in this parish. I’m dead certain one will strike your fancy,” Colin says, eyeing her hopefully.
She continues to stare holes in his page of notes.
“Laurel?”
“Sorry. I was thinking.”
“About astrologers?”
She still can’t give a straight answer, and still can’t think why. She doesn’t even have to look at him to feel what Amanda must have felt the first time she encountered him—what the twittering matrons in the Oyster Bar must have felt before they were shooed away—what the young girls in the museum must have felt when they discovered him there—what her sister Emily must have felt when he kissed her—what countless numbers of female fans must have felt any time he took the stage or took his pick of them.
“Is Augu
st too soon? Too late? You wanna just slope off somewhere and be done with it?” he says.
“No, absolutely not. I want a traditional wedding. I want what you want. The date’s fine. I’m fine.”
“Then what’s goin’ on over there? You’ll hardly look at me.”
“Something’s been happening . . . I think it was when I started listening to all your old albums and then it increased when I watched you in rehearsal and now . . . now—”
“What happened? Are you tellin’ me you’ve changed your mind? C’mon, Laurel, I need to know. I’ve a bleedin’ right to know.”
“I think it’s finally landed on me that you are Colin Elliot . . . the Colin Elliot, and you actually want to marry me. I think I’m finally acknowledging your iconic stature and the tremendous pull of your music and I’m—”
“Dare I ask what in bloody hell brought this on?”
“What I just said. Seeing you rehearse, listening to your recordings, watching the video you made for me. It’s all combined to be an ultimate reality check and I’m . . . I’m absolutely staggered.”
“I suppose I ought to be flattered and I’m not, actually. But I do know a little about the reality check shit because whenever I catch sight of you in the garden running after a football with Anthony, or watch you show Simon the tenderness you did just a bit ago when you didn’t know I was spying on you, I wanna pinch myself to be sure I’m not dreaming. It’s like during the night when I wake up to be sure you’re still next to me and still breathing.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Well, so’s going openmouthed and drooling because you’ve just got round to seeing me in different light.”
“I have to agree, but I’ll never be able to write about you without extreme prejudice.”
“Old news, that. Objectivity’s vastly overrated anyway. Just put in a disclaimer saying you became smitten with the irresistible subject and all the opinions expressed are slanted. That should take care of it, shouldn’t it?”