Skin Deep

by Timothy Hallinan

  "Mr. Grist?" Norman Stillman's voice slithered bonelessly through the line. "We certainly owe you a world of thanks, don't we?"

  "Do we?"

  "Let's don't be modest, Mr. Grist. This is a delicate time, and you pulled the fat right out of the fire."

  "Mr. Stillman." I closed my eyes and rubbed wearily at the bridge of my nose. The room reeled, and I quickly reopened my eyes. "I'm not being modest. I just don't know what you're talking about." Even as I said it, I realized that I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  He chuckled lightly, something I've never been able to master. I can do a hearty chuckle when I've had a few strong ones, but a light chuckle is too Noel Coward for me. I was trying to imitate his when I realized he was talking.

  ". . . our boy," he said. "One more problem and we would all have been in very hot water."

  "I don't know about you," I said, "but he passed simmer a long time ago."

  "He speaks highly of you."

  "With the chemical content of his blood, he can't speak any way but highly."

  "Now, now," he said. "Let's not be judgmental."

  It was too stupid to answer, so I examined the phone cord for knots. Phone cord knots, unlike anything else in the Universe, appear via spontaneous generation.

  "I've practically watched him grow up," Stillman said after a beat. "And you can take it from me, at heart Toby's a fine young man."

  "I'll bet," I said, "that you called me for a reason."

  Stillman cleared his throat of Toby. "Do you think you could be in my office around noon?"

  "I don't know. Why?"

  "I have a job for you."

  I looked out the window, focusing through one of the holes in the screen on the mountains to the south. I had two hundred of Toby's dollars in my shirt pocket and owed $315 for rent. Then, also, there was the possibility of Roxanne. I couldn't very well ask her to pay for a date. At least, not a first date.

  "Mr. Grist?"

  "I'm here. I don't think I can make it at noon. What about one-thirty?"

  "I have a screening at two. Oneish?"

  "Okayish. Where are you?"

  "Universal Studios. Just give your name at the Lankershim gate and the guard will direct you."

  We muttered polite good-byes. If I was to meet him at one, my mental state needed emergency surgery, and the only way I knew how to do that was to run eight or nine hard, sweaty miles. Afterward I would need a long sauna and a good fifteen minutes under a shower before I could hope to regain that boyish glow. It was a full agenda. To my surprise, the day looked a little better.

  Feeling righteous, I went over to the computer and snapped it off. It sputtered at me.

  I completed my rise from the dead at UCLA in Westwood, where the sauna is hot and the coeds are the daughters of the California girls the Beach Boys warned us about. Iridescent from the sauna, I tossed my running shoes into Alice and pointed her north and east. Since I had a little time and I hadn't dipped into Hollywood in a few weeks, I tracked along Wilshire to Santa Monica and then east on Santa Monica to Highland. Winos dozed on bus benches. Little old ladies using walkers waited for the yellow light before beginning their long toddle across the street and then looked agitated as the horns blared. In the brown-paper-bag sunlight along Santa Monica Boulevard the hookers trolled the traffic for business with their thumbs extended. School was out, and the average age had dropped appreciably.

  Highland Boulevard took me over the Cahuenga Pass and then turned mysteriously into Ventura Boulevard. A right onto Lankershim and a dip down the hill, and I was at Universal Studios. I parked Alice between a Rolls-Royce and a Maserati and left her, looking like a bright blue boil in a courtesan's box of beauty spots.

  Stillman's office was a cute little million-dollar bungalow shaded by a couple of eucalyptus trees. I got my first surprise when he opened the door himself.

  "You're Mr. Grist," he said enthusiastically.

  I agreed. He took my elbow to lead me, and I took it back. "I can see okay," I said.

  Stillman laughed as if I'd said something funny. He was the sort of man who is always a little shorter than you remember him being, as though he'd shrunk while you weren't looking. I got an economical glimpse of immaculate white teeth that must have cost a fortune to straighten and cap, set off by a sunlamp tan and a pair of very small dark eyes huddling furtively beneath eyebrows that had, just possibly, known the sting of a tweezer. He'd traded his blazer for a hand-knitted sweater with a sailboat on the front. Still nautical, but not so formal. His balding head gleamed.

  "Dierdre and Pauline are at lunch," he said, indicating a couple of empty desks with a careless wave. "You're certainly punctual. I appreciate that."

  He continued to appreciate me as we passed through the secretarial area and into a short hallway. The closed door at the end of the hall said MR. STILLMAN on it in letters the size of the Hollywood sign. "Here we are," he said in case I'd missed them.

  The room on the other side of the door looked bigger than the entire bungalow had looked from outside. I stepped onto Wedgwood blue carpeting that an iron-shod Percheron could have galloped across in silence. The window shades were drawn to keep the day at a tasteful distance, and the lighting was indirect. The mahogany-spoked wheel of a yacht hung on the opposite wall, behind a desk that looked like a bowling alley on legs. The only object on the desk's polished surface was a huge brass ship's compass.

  "I don't know why," I said, "but I'd be willing to bet you've got a boat."

  He laughed again and went to stand possessively behind his desk. "Half-right, Mr. Grist. In fact, I've got two of them. One's in the Marina, and one's on her way here from Hong Kong." He gestured at a large map of the Pacific that filled most of one wall. Two red pins were the only blemishes in its pale blue surface. "The Cabuchon. At this precise moment, she should be pulling into Honolulu."

  "Lucky her."

  "This is Mr. Cohen. Dixie, this is our hero, Mr. Grist."

  I didn't see Dixie Cohen until he stood up; he had that kind of negative charisma. He'd been perching on a captain's chair near the door, and now he held his hand out to me, a thin, worried-looking, nearly completely bald little man on whose corduroy shoulders the angel of despair almost visibly perched. "Terrific work," he said mournfully. He wore professorial leather patches on the elbows of his jacket.

  "Not on purpose," I said.

  "The result is the same," Cohen said.

  Sitting down, Norman Stillman briskly rubbed his smooth, tapered hands together. They made a dry, powdery noise.

  "Nothing in the press," Cohen murmured lugubriously to the carpet, looking at it as though it were an old friend who had just died. "Good all around."

  "Good for whom?" I fought off an urge to pat Dixie Cohen comfortingly on the shoulder and looked around for someplace to sit.

  "For us, Mr. Grist." Stillman followed my glance. "Dixie," he commanded, "give Mr. Grist your chair." Cohen shuffled off across the carpet to grab one from a matched platoon lined up against the wall.

  "What's so good?" I said, sitting. "Who cares if the little bedbug gets tossed in the can? It's better than he deserves."

  "Let's not get sidetracked into a discussion of Toby's character," Stillman said. He looked down at the schooner sailing across the front of his sweater, spotted a wrinkle in the mainsail, tugged it straight, and then treated me to another million-dollar smile. The smile was as meaningless as Toby's, just something that staked claim to the lower half of Stillman's face whenever it felt like it. "Toby's approach to life is not the topic of the day."

  "And what is the topic of the day?"

  "Employment for you, Mr. Grist. I think I said that on the phone. Highly lucrative employment."

  From behind me I heard Cohen lug a chair across the carpet. He sat down behind me and breathed resentfully once or twice.

  "Would it be vulgar," I asked, "to mention an actual number?"

  Stillman gave me his light chuckle. "That'll come. First, let's
explain our little problem and see if it interests you. From what Toby's told me, I gather that's very much in your line. Quite the White Knight, Toby says." He cut off the chuckle and tapped the surface of his desk with a polished nail. "Dixie?"

  Dixie stood up with a deep sigh that seemed to have its roots in his knees. He put his hands in his pockets and walked to the edge of Stillman's desk. Then he looked off into space until Stillman cleared his throat significantly.

  "How much do you know about Toby Vane?" Cohen said to the room at large.

  "He's an actor. He's on a lot of magazine covers. He's a certifiable sadist."

  "That's succinct," Dixie Cohen acknowledged, staring at a spot above my head. "But you left one thing out. He's not just an actor, he's a star."

  "I left out that he's an asshole, too," I said.

  "Ah, yes," Dixie Cohen said sadly, "but he's our asshole." He eased his rear end onto the corner of Stillman's desk.

  "Dixie," Stillman said sharply. Cohen straightened up as if he'd sat on a stove. Stillman reached over, way over, and brushed at the spot where Cohen had sat.

  "High Velocity is in its sixth year," Cohen said with all the enthusiasm of a kid reciting the alphabet on command. "It's never been in the top five, but it's stayed out of the bottom thirty. This is, hip hooray, year last."

  "Excuse me," I said, "but what's High Velocity?"

  Stillman's mouth opened. Cohen couldn't have looked more surprised if I'd squatted on a lamp and started spitting maraschino cherries.

  "It's Toby's series," he said. "You must have seen it."

  "Nope."

  "Even if you haven't, you must have heard of it. The publicity . . ."He spread his hands in sheer incomprehension.

  "I've missed it," I said. Stillman looked at Cohen, and Cohen made a helpless gesture. Of course, I thought. He had to be the publicity man.

  "Well," Cohen said, dredging up a mortician's smile, "most people who haven't spent the last six years at the bottom of a lead mine know about High Velocity. A hundred million or so of them have even watched it."

  "Great show," Stillman said automatically. "Lots of action, but wholesome action. Nobody gets killed onscreen, or if they do, we cut away just before the plug gets pulled."

  "Good role models," Cohen said. "Citation from the White House and everything."

  "I get the point," I said. "It's a TV show."

  "A very successful TV show, Mr. Grist," Norman Still-man said. "And it's all Toby Vane."

  "A hundred percent," Cohen said. They sounded like Laurel and Hardy.

  "And . . . ?"

  "And we've got a problem." Dixie Cohen's face was even more furrowed and worried-looking than before.

  "To hazard a wild surmise," I said, "Toby Vane."

  "Exactly." Cohen looked hesitant. "Oh, well," he said. "Here goes. During the third season we were shooting on location in Northridge, you know Northridge?" He seemed to expect me to say no.

  I said I knew Northridge.

  "We were out near the college there, and the kids kept coming around to watch us work. Just regular Valley kids, you know? And, naturally, some of them were girls."

  "Come on, Dixie," Stillman said, drumming his fingers on his desk. "Get on with it."

  Cohen swallowed, and I suddenly recognized his discomfort for what it really was: he hated to be there. He would have given his life to be able to float straight up, through the ceiling, and into some pure, clear stratosphere where there was no Toby Vane to worry about. It made me like him better than I liked Stillman.

  "There was this one little girl," Cohen was saying. "She hung around for a couple of days, and Toby began to talk to her. Real pretty little girl." He swallowed again. "About my daughter's age at the time. Anyway, Toby started talking to her, and then he got the director to let her have a walk-on. What Toby wants, goes."

  "Right," I said. "I already had that feeling."

  "So she finishes her bit, and she's all excited, and then Toby takes her to show her his dressing room, this big air-conditioned van. We all knew what was happening, or at least we thought we did. Then she started to scream. Everybody could hear her."

  "No melodrama," Stillman said, looking at his fingernails. "Not everybody could hear her, there were lots of people who didn't hear anything at all. Just tell the story."

  "Well, there were cops there. There always are when you're on location. We had to go into the trailer."

  "Because of the cops," I said.

  "Beg pardon?" Dixie's eyebrows rose.

  "You mean you wouldn't have gone in if there hadn't been cops around?"

  Cohen made his helpless gesture again. He'd had a lot of practice. "Sure, we would have. I didn't mean that. We're not ghouls, you know. But cops being there made the whole thing more, well, urgent."

  "More urgent than what?"

  "Than it would have been otherwise," Stillman said smoothly. "Lord's sake, Mr. Grist, Toby wasn't killing her."

  "Just a little fun," I said, thinking of the photo albums. I pulled my car keys from my pocket, and Stillman followed them anxiously with his eyes. "You know, this is a terrific office," I said, jingling the keys. "And I suppose that means that you guys aren't dumb. All things considered, though, I don't know why I shouldn't just get up and go to the beach. At least I'd know what I was doing there."

  "Come on, Dixie," Stillman said. "Tell Mr. Grist why he's here."

  Cohen looked like a man who'd just been given a choice between the rack and electric shock therapy. "Because of Toby," he finally said. "Because we need some help with Toby."

  "Toby's the one who needs help," I said. "And I'm not qualified to give it. I'm not sure anyone is who doesn't have twelve letters after his name and three or four degrees on the wall."

  "You have a number of degrees," Cohen said. Someone had been doing homework.

  "Sure," I said apologetically. "Dramatic literature, history, comparative religion, I forget what. But none in psychiatry."

  Cohen grimaced. "Psychiatry takes time. We don't have any. We don't need a shrink, we need a keeper."

  "Dixie," Stillman said. "Not a keeper, Mr. Grist." He extended a well-buffed hand and formed a word in the air. The word seemed to be shaped vaguely like a fish. "A consultant. Is that polite enough? A person who can help Toby, who can talk to him when he's about to do something self-destructive."

  "Self-destructive? Toby's a human wrecking ball. I've seen enough buildings get knocked down to know that the wrecking ball usually comes out okay. It's everything else that gets leveled."

  It was Stillman's turn to sigh, and he did it eloquently. "We're trying to tell you something," he said. "Don't interrupt, don't say anything for a minute, all right? There's a business opportunity here for you. At the moment, Toby's behavior is of very special importance. At this precise moment. We see you as a key, Mr. Grist. We'll pay a great deal to someone who can keep things on track."

  "I still don't actually know what you're talking about. And even if I did, I haven't heard any money mentioned, except in the abstract."

  "A thousand dollars a day," Stillman said. "Is that concrete enough for you?"

  Now it was my turn to swallow. If Stillman and I kept gobbling up Cohen's mannerisms, there wouldn't be anything left of him but his sweater. I wondered if it would fit me. I looked at the two of them. Stillman returned my gaze, all frank and hearty and man to man. Cohen was still focused on the ceiling he wanted to float through. It seemed to be my line.

  "Toby's been punching out women for at least three years, according to you. Why the sudden concern?"

  They looked at each other again, but more confidently. "What do you know about syndication, Mr. Grist?" Still-man said.

  "Nothing."

  Stillman settled himself in his chair. "Syndication is the real bottom line of a series," he said in a loving voice. "It's why they get made in the first place. After a show has been on the air for a while, especially a hit show, it becomes valuable in a new way. Throughout its first run, it's
produced for the network. The network pays what's known as a license fee. That means that the producer, say me, for example, gets paid a certain amount for every episode that airs. Say it's a million dollars." He drew an imaginary line on his desk with his index finger. "Are you following me so far?"

  I nodded.

  Stillman warmed to the task. "Fine. Let's say, just to pick another figure, that the series is supposed to cost nine hundred thou per hour." He drew another line. "That means a profit of a hundred thou for each show, right?"

  "I can subtract."

  "That's the problem," he said, making an imaginary X with his finger to cancel out the imaginary lines. "It's all subtraction. Half the episodes cost more than the license fee. Talent trouble, bad weather, weak scripts, the wrong director—any number of things can put a show over budget. In the long run, even with a hit series and a lot of creative bookkeeping, you wind up breaking even. Or, even worse, in the hole." He described a large circle on the desk's surface for my benefit. "The big eggola," he said.

  I stayed put. The highly suspect smell of money filled the room.

  "But," Stillman continued, smiling seraphically, "when the series is finally finished on the network, the producer can sell it to stations all over the country. One station at a time or ten stations at a time. Most of them aren't network affiliates, of course. They're independent stations, some little, some big, some rich and some poor. But they've all got money to spend. They need something to put on the air, and they're ready to pay for it."

  "How much?"

  He buffed his immaculate nails on his nautical sweater. "Well, that's the art of it," he said complacently, someone who had been fed all the answers. "Knowing how much a show is worth. The best guess I can make is that High Velocity is worth about three hundred thousand dollars an hour." He almost resisted the impulse to clear his throat.

  I cleared my own throat. "How many hours?"

  "Six seasons, Mr. Grist. One hundred and eighty hours."

  Math was never my strong point. "That's, um . . ."