by Hilary Plum
The first and second seasons had gotten buzz like you wouldn’t believe and deservedly. By season three things had settled down, the show wasn’t so hot anymore, disappointing, but as a bonus it wasn’t so bad for me with the tabloids. A few hopefuls still might get their shots as I walked in and out of my apartment or restaurants downtown, but that was it, and I had the best windows and blinds ever manufactured, no light in, no sounds out, you could fuck every which way all day long and the five guys perched in your hedge would know nothing.
But in the middle of season four, no warning, the shitshow was back on. One rag got on a real plastic surgery kick, a so-called series, before and after pictures, exposing who’d had what done, etc. As though you couldn’t have known just by looking. We could all learn a few things here, I said to Emilia, how to make some real money. You print celeb shots all day every day, photoshop every face and bikini bod into complete fantasy, so that the actual owners of the faces have to kill themselves just to keep up, and then when things are slow you run an exposé on how they’re all phonies, how many times they’ve gone under the knife. And you charge people who actually work for a living for the privilege of this information.
Emilia doesn’t usually warm to such outbursts, maybe a little murmur, a little shake of the head, but it must have been only a week later that she’d called me to say: Babe, I’m so sorry.
It’s fine, I said.
Fine? she said. Fine?
What are we talking about, I said, and she said, Oh hon, they’ve printed your medical records.
And that’s what they’d fucking done. Clues to Detective Garsin’s Mystery Disease! splashed across the cover. And then, indeed, the article was full of references to my medical history, doctors’ names, appointment dates, bloodwork ordered, the whole thing, up to each dodgy mole. Luckily it seemed my bout of the clap was too far back to surface. These records would appear to dispel the rumors of illness that have been dogging the actor…
Rumors? I asked anyone.
The thing is, Emilia said, they’ve been saying you’ve been looking very pale, really sick.
I’m 51 years old, I said, and most of those years were not pretty.
But I knew that wasn’t the reason. The reason was Modigliani—that is, the real detective, the one I was based on. My role was based on, that is, Garsin. I’d met the man: when we were shooting the first season he’d come by. Stood in the back, this tall guy in a slouchy leather jacket that was the prototype for the one I wore. Mine in fact fit much better, though I’d always called it ill-fitting, as did the reviews. He was white, really white, a gleam to the forearms his jacket was pushed up to expose. I had a photo of us, one of a few taken around the set, although these had nearly been confiscated by Modigliani. Can’t have pictures of me out there, he said, you understand, and they’d had to promise him they’d deleted the files, then offered the three extant prints to the showrunner, Modigliani, and me. I kept mine on the mantle, which amused me. And maybe it’s true that as the show went to shit, out of some kind of respect for what once had been I’d stayed devoted to maintaining his appearance.
And although I said nothing of this to anyone, there in the paper, part two of the same goddamn exposé: next to the photo of me, a photo of none other than Modigliani. Plastic Surgery to Look Like Real-Life Detective?! the headline inquired. My God, Emilia said. More medical records, this time including a couple scanned pages, printed right there. The Post could find no records of surgery, the article, if it could be called that, concluded. And yet rumors continue to circulate, speculating on how actor Woodruff has come to look so much like the real-life sleuth. Friends and costars wonder about his stability. “It’s like he’s mistaken himself for a real detective,” one costar told us—off the record so as not to provoke Woodruff’s notorious bad temper.
Months of legal bullshit later all I got for my troubles was a paragraph acknowledging an error, expressed so vaguely that no one—even those sad souls who read correction boxes—could know what it meant.
You do look like him, actually, my lawyer had said, the photos spread out across his desk. Although, and I’m not just paid to say this, you are significantly better looking.
I am a professional, I said.
That’s how it got going between me and the Post. After that article I dedicated myself to the papers, read every one. Every Sunday I’d trot myself to the stand on the corner and get the rags and the classics, I’d sit and read all the A sections and check out the rest nice and slow. Impressive, Emilia said. Meaning she was doubtful. I’m reaching a dignified middle age, I told her.
So when some actress won that first lawsuit against the Post, I took note. Little druggy brunette who liked married men, but was a real talent. (Emilia said, don’t be like that, it was just the one married man and they dated forever. I didn’t invent the world, I said back, which I admit is something an asshole would say.) The paper had been hacking into her voicemails, listening to everything and printing all sorts of smutty “quotes,” complete with dramatic ellipses. It was unbelievable, but there it was, printed up in paragraphs like anything. They’d admitted to it, in a limited way—one rogue PI, not even on our staff, now fired, they said—and she’d won the suit. And over the next few months a few more suits were filed, first- and second-tier celebrities, same deal. Voicemails hacked.
It had never been my habit to pay attention to things like the news, and I found the experience—the fact that I knew this was happening almost as it happened—an uncomfortable pleasure. I’d always just checked out the front pages of those garbage-bin liners, the lurid snaps: skin-and-bones crooner tottling out of rehab, a reality show bimbo’s perp walk, another’s suicide note, this or that politician in a dim restaurant with his mistress, this Olympian with his bong, or me, undeniable spring in my step as I strolled out of that gay club one night, having met T there, old habits die hard.
And so there I was, shooting the end of the fifth season, and it came to me: Why not play detective?
I started a file of articles on the hacking, noted reporters’ names. I dug around in archives. Sent Emilia to the library. At night online I read up on recording devices, ordered a few. Just in case.
My lawsuit must have gotten me on some list, and the first few reporters I called didn’t bite. But then I found Chuck. I’d looked into Chuck and all along I’d thought he could be my man. I didn’t call him straight up; I was learning. I rented a car, nice dark windows, started tailing him. I wanted to see what any of them were up to, I wanted to see the whole life. Chuck was a young, nervous type, I think he was South Asian, if that matters. Rumor had it that he’d leaked extra info to the opposition in the hacking suits, out of some on-the-buzzer shot at journalistic ethics. I’d gotten that much from encounters with brunette and her lawyers, as well as reading between the lines of the articles, which made it seem like there’d been a pretty half-hearted instance of whistleblowing. On the sixth day of my tail, Chuck pulled over, got out of his car and started swearing, popped his hood and stared at the engine, but it was just a pose for passing cars, guy looks at engine, he didn’t touch a thing. Fuck it, I thought, and pulled over. Need a jump? I said. No way, he said, on seeing me. We didn’t talk much, but got the car started.
I owe you one, man, he said.
I take cash, I said, and to acknowledge his debt he acted like that was a joke.
Two nights later I followed Chuck to his favorite hangout. I was prepared. The word’s always been that I’m a total fucking psycho when I lose my temper, and if needed I could call up the old gleam in the eye. There is no man alive who isn’t scared of your chest hair, a costume girl had once said to me, unbuttoning one more button and awkwardly fluffing the thatch beneath. Tonight I did the same, for good measure. I went in. Chuck, I said, buying him the beer I’d seen him with the last time. Chuck, how’s it going?
Close up, in the light, Chuck was neither young nor nervous. He n
odded thanks for the beer. I’m ditching the Honda, he said.
Sometimes you get what you pay for, I said.
Supposed to be the most reliable in the world, he said. I’ve been brand faithful for a decade, but now—he shrugged—I’m telling you, the future is wide open.
I just up and asked him about the medical records, who had got them, how. If he’d needed more incentive I was ready to give him a little industry dirt I’d stored up, maybe dish on some big names who show up to fuck where you wouldn’t expect, there were one or two who could stand a rough week. At first he didn’t say much, but then he said enough. In the end it was like he’d been waiting for someone to ask.
Late that night I pulled off the wire, with it some of my luxuriant chest hair, and burned the conversation onto my computer, burned backups as well. Everyone knows, he said, and of course we pay cops. We pay rehab people, doctor’s receptionists, how could we get where we do as fast as we do if we didn’t?
And the voicemail? I asked.
You just pay your way, he said. And you’re in.
Hey, I’m sorry about the medical thing, he said later, drunk but not unconvincing.
Oh, I said, I think I’m going to be all right.
I gave my recording to the cops, but nothing happened. By now it was mid-sixth season and there wouldn’t be a seventh. I’d signed up for a raunchy rom-com and a TV miniseries, ripped from the headlines thing, on domestic abuse. Good for you, my agent said, or was it Emilia. I waited three months on the cops: nothing. There’s an ongoing investigation, they said, the one time someone worthwhile called me back. But I was busy, we were filming the series finale, which included some post-hurricane scenes that took forever. Once you sank in, if you really just let yourself be in it, it was scary as fuck. The last five episodes had a continuous storyline—my idea. If they’ve stuck with Garsin this long, I said, give them some of the old magic. The plot was too sensational—some modern-day KKK thing that would let everybody feel good about not being racists, but didn’t measure up to what had actually gone down in that city before, during, or after the storm. But who am I to complain, slamming cuffs on a grandmaster, punching one of his redneck minions across the table, classic, cracking the two-way mirror? You look like shit, Emilia said over Skype, and I said: I’m supposed to be living in a trailer with no running water, how good should I look? They’d finally agreed to let me grow some stubble. Small victories.
And so at the end of all this, there I was, looking at my reflection, and I did look gaunter, leaner, unlike myself.
Fuck the police, I thought, I’ll go to the papers.
I called one of the women who’d been covering the hacking stories, written what I’d thought were a few nice pieces, nice as far as I was a judge. I have this recording, I said. She was interested. Let’s meet in person, I said. She smiled coolly, her blouse crisp but tucked into an ancient jean skirt, acid-washed. She listened, but really she wanted the recording.
I’m a fan, she said, smiling, as she got up to go.
It was nothing, I said, just a night’s work, least I could do.
She looked confused and I figured it out, waved a hand.
Who are you anyway, Alice? Later that night I dug in, searched the reporter’s name. It was only then that I learned the hurricane shootings—my hurricane shootings, I thought, my series finale—had been a real case. Never solved. My girl Alice had written a magazine series on it, hard-hitting, outraged. But they never got the guys. She laid out scene after scene and then, pfff. What. As far as I could tell there were two main candidates for the killers—this private company Xenith or some local racist militia. Except of course the latter might include some cops, which would be one more reason no one had cracked down, no one had gone to jail, other than the sort of people who were always going to jail. Photos of the real-life victims, a man and a woman, loaded slowly on every page I scrolled through. Experts thought they’d died execution-style, on their knees. Obviously whoever’d written this season of Detective Garsin—I should know exactly who—had chosen the militia option, left Xenith out of it. But reading the story I thought they’d chosen wrong. What about this night here, when, according to Alice, the Xenith guys said they’d been shot at by some quote black gangbangers near an overpass. I dropped my phone and returned fire. There was no end even to that story, just one Xenith kid later saying that afterward all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said. Alice never found the gangbangers. There was no report. Cops didn’t bestir themselves. To fare well in a situation like this, I thought, you either want to be with Xenith or with Detective Garsin.
And the head of the hurricane investigation—was I even surprised—was none other than Modigliani.
Small world.
To scratch an itch I searched the name Bill LeRoy.
I went to bed.
I could never have called it the way it played out.
The Post’s sins caught up with it a pleasant June day a summer later. I still kept up on the news, but not with the same vigor, I wasn’t up to much. The rom-com had fallen through and the domestic abuse thing took about ten days, start to finish. I wasn’t playing the abuser like I would have in the old days, now I got to be the valiant coworker. Thank you, Garsin. Left to my own devices I was looking into investing in this community garden thing just north of downtown, buying up the lot next to the garden, which would be good for development if the revitalization took off.
Then, one day on the front page: bam. The face of that girl, the one who’d gone missing and turned up dead almost a decade ago. It was strange to see her again, you kept thinking: shouldn’t she be all grown up? I’d been drinking a lot back then, and whenever I’d bobbed to the surface for a few hours, her face was on some screen. Missing two months before they found the body. Jesus, Emilia said, when the girl’s face smiled up at her from the paper I held. I thought they caught that guy, she said, I don’t want to hear about that ever again.
But this was something new: My little miss reporter had proved the Post had hacked the girl’s voicemail in the months before she’d turned up dead. Reporters sat around listening to every sobbing desperate message from parents and friends, used any and everything juicy. To keep the story going they deleted messages they were done with, cleared the mailbox. But this of course let everyone—cops, parents, friends, other papers—think maybe the girl was still alive, checking her phone, maybe they could still find her. When she’d been a corpse, gagged, bound, and discarded in a warehouse basement, within a day of going missing. Little miss’s story showed up first in one mid-sized paper, then everywhere. It wasn’t the first or last phone hack, maybe not even, all told, the worst—they’d hacked victims of terrorism, former heads of state—but people were calling for blood. And a few articles later, my phone was ringing: The actor Martin Woodruff, best known for the critically acclaimed but controversially violent series Detective Garsin, wore a wire to obtain… A little undercover work of his own…
I went on the talk shows. I’d filled out a little, in a good way. I said more than I expected. Disgusting, I said. Violation of privacy, of basic ethics, of the public’s trust. It surprised me that people kept listening, kept plopping me down in a wheelie chair to say some more. You know, no one’s really asked me about anything real before, I said, in response to some question about the appropriate legislative response, and I hadn’t finished but there was laughter everywhere, and that line took off, like it was even a line.
Of course it meant I was back to the limelight, cameras and microphones tripping over themselves to get at me. But a higher-class crowd was calling, and no one mentioned the male escort credit card charges from back when, which was polite. New scripts came in.
Well played, I thought, flicking the framed photo of me and Modigliani, but I meant only me. A police chief had resigned. A high-level member of the president’s PR staff, who’d come to govern
ment from the Post: out, and under investigation. The newspaper shut its doors. Its owners—who owned maybe a fifth of the world’s papers—were called down from their customary pedestals and made to sweat it out in a hearing or two. They lost some millions. I wore it all well, I thought. Emilia had left me, presumably temporarily, for a spiritual retreat. In her absence I fucked less than usual.
In fact, the reporter was the only one. A couple nice nights in a hotel I thought she’d like. But anyway she never wrote a word about me. I checked. She must have handed off my CD, handed off the whole scoop, who knows. There were plenty of stories, though. I was hot, my agent told me relentlessly, now’s the time.
Alice
They say when the water rises, each coast will drown, every skyscraper, hotel, retirement community, luxury beach, the cliffs where the rich weekend. Maybe tourists will travel to see the start of the deluge, what will wash away first in the great storms to come. It’s hard to mourn, even early in the day, when the water is mindlessly clear and just warm, and on the beach leather-skinned men gather to play a game of pétanque. It’s hard not to feel that the sea has waited long enough. I am so pale in this place, I walk down the sand like a foreigner.
A harbinger.
When I was young and lived back east in the city, in the sort of shabby converted factory flat that people would now kill for, I used to walk down what was then an abandoned street, down to the water that divided the city from itself. The nighttime panorama: bridges to the north and south, the different eras of their architecture demarcated by their lit-up forms, by their reflections in dark water, and facing me was the island, frantic with light, highway along its coast traced by passing headlights, black planes of its skyscrapers now silent, to their south endless bar lights and billboards, too far to discern human figures. The nearest bridge was the oldest and the city’s great poets had memorialized it in turn. It was built before anyone understood the danger of pressure in the caissons and seventeen men had died planting its pilings, of what we now call the bends. The rocks before me were slimy and thoroughly littered and I walked out on them to the farthest point, where I imagined, young thing that I was, that if anyone had passed by and seen me, or had come down as well to love the water by night, I would have cut a romantic figure against the dark backdrop, the bright blur of the bridges. Bats flew over and maybe in time they knew me by my form. If I wasn’t alone I never knew it, I faced the horizon, the water, the scene.