Company Town

by Paul Neuhaus

  Henaghan had never heard of The Guild. “Tell me more…”

  “Lunch tomorrow,” David said.

  “Deal.”

  As she stood to return to her couch, Quinn looked at her news feed. Amidst the usual nonsense, The Los Angeles Times had just published a piece on Rosebud. How there hadn’t been a murder in almost two months and how the trail was going cold. Henaghan bookmarked it for later reading. Rosebud was an active serial killer, adept at avoiding capture. The name came from a cinephile reporter at the Times. “Rosebud” was the last word spoken by Charles Foster Kane, the titular character of Citizen Kane. The movie was based on William Randolph Hearst. William Randolph Hearst kept a mistress. Marion Davies. Supposedly, his name for Davies’ vagina was “rosebud”. Rosebud—the killer, not the vagina—was known for cutting off the labia of his victims, a signature move that made Quinn grimace every time she heard it.

  Quinn was always in bed by ten. Weekdays were tough for her. She had to get to ACT early to clear the decks for David’s day. Everything needed to be prioritized and scheduled tightly. The agent’s time was precious and any glitches were flagged as Henaghan’s fault. Every morning, she got up at six for the drive over to Beverly Hills, so that meant no Netflix and chill for her. She did, however, have one outstanding task.

  Tuesday and Thursday nights were masturbation nights. The act was always clinical and removed but it kept her head clear throughout the week. After she was through, she collected her panties and slid them back on. The fresh orgasm eased her into sleep. Right before she left the waking world, she saw the phantasms, weird ectoplasmic shapes orbiting her room where the walls met the ceiling.

  Quinn had seen the phantasms on the border between waking and slumber every day of her life. She took them for granted and even assumed everyone saw phantasms at night. For twenty-seven years they’d watched over her in her bed.

  That was about to change.

  2

  Need

  Quinn parked in the American Consolidated parking deck at seven A.M. Feeling bone-tired, she grabbed her big canvas bag and got out of the Prius. At her right shoulder, Kari Kennedy-Chan appeared as she always did. The two women arrived in tandem every morning, both of them slack-shouldered and burdened with a big bag of personal effects. Kennedy-Chan was taller than Quinn, but then again, most women were taller than Quinn. The only girl she knew who was shorter than herself was her sister Mia, who leveled off at an embarrassing four foot eleven.

  “How was clubbing the clam?” Kari said. Quinn had one day made the mistake of telling the other girl about her Tuesday-Thursday routine.

  Henaghan sighed as she held the door into the building open. “Do you think about that when you’re driving in? Every Wednesday and Friday do you sit there, listening to the Morning Zoo Crew and saying to yourself, I can’t wait to say to Quinn, ‘How was clubbing the clam?’”

  Kennedy-Chan grinned and said, “Yeah, kinda.”

  The two women walked down a long, fluorescent-lit hallway and passed a kid in a tie pushing a mail cart. “Do you like this little dance?” Quinn said, realizing she’d had enough. “This dance where you get to flout your supposed superiority over me because you’re married to a software engineer and you have a kid? I mean is that why you married Eddie in the first place? So you could rub other girls’ noses in it? As if other girls gave a shit about your husband with the black hair growing out of his mole or your kid with the cleft palette.”

  Kari was barely listening. She’d gotten hung up on something Henaghan had said early on. “What’s a flout?” she said.

  Quinn ignored the question. “Listen,” she said. “I’m gonna invoke a combination of the Golden Rule and ‘If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say’. If all you can think of is, ‘How was clubbing the clam?’ maybe hang back a couple of steps. Maybe don’t talk to me at all. I’ve got enough on my plate with the pathological shyness and the social interaction avoidance thing. I neither need nor want your bullshit.”

  Kennedy-Chan was not offended. She looked indifferent and bored. “Okay,” she said, and she slowed her pace so that Henaghan could get ahead.

  Right before Quinn got to the lobby, she passed the double glass doors leading into the courtyard. The man and woman who manned the food wagon were brewing coffee and unwrapping the trays of danishes they got at Costco. The woman waved at Henaghan and Quinn nodded back. She still felt angry and embarrassed by her conversation with Kari—even though she was sure Kari didn’t give a shit about the interaction at all. That was the one way Quinn could think of that she wanted to be more like Kari. She’d never mastered the awesome power of ‘I don’t give a fuck’.

  The ACT lobby was designed to incite awe. The ceiling was several stories above and every floor had its own railing overlooking the reception area. It was a lobby that said, “We’re a Big Deal”. Every morning when she came in, Henaghan craned her neck looking up at the light fixture made of long clear crystals, an ovation toward old Hollywood glamor and extravagance. Every morning, she bought into the whole Big Deal-iness of it all.

  Canvas bag in tow, she took the elevator to the ninth floor and hugged the wall on the way to David Olkin’s suite of offices. As much as she liked looking up at the chandelier, she hated looking down at it. Heights were one of her least favorite things. Hanging a left and sitting down at her desk, she moved her mouse and awakened her crappy Windows computer. She filtered Olkin’s mail, weeding out the bullshit, then she went over his schedule in Omnifocus, dragging and dropping a few of the entries into new positions depending on the ever-changing latticework of the agent’s day. With the prep work out of the way, she settled in for a four hour pre-lunch stint of running interference and making sure David adhered to his own commitments. The pace in the office was frenetic and she and Olkin spoke barely twenty full sentences to one another from the opening bell to mealtime.

  At noon, David headed out of the suite. “I’ve got to tell Watts a couple of things before lunch. Give me fifteen minutes, then meet me in the courtyard.”

  Quinn smiled and nodded.

  As Quinn wove through ACT’s lobby toward the courtyard, she had a Barry Faber sighting. Faber was a legend at the agency. Known around town as “The Woman’s Agent”, he specialized in female clients. Henaghan had only seen him once or twice and he was always with one of his ladies. Today was no exception. Walking next to him (and being dwarfed by him) was a mid-level actress who, while not at the top of her game, was still working. She was trim and five foot six. Faber, at six-four and well over two hundred pounds, was a walking mountain.

  Quinn watched as the hulking agent escorted the B-lister to the front door, then she hung a left toward the outdoor lunch space.

  When Quinn got outside, she looked around and saw David Olkin already at a concrete table. She pointed at the lunch wagon, indicating she would order food, but he shook his head and waved her over. She wove through the sparse crowd and sat opposite him on a hard bench of her own. At his feet, was a brown briefcase.

  Olkin would’ve been handsome were it not for his pock-marked cheeks and crooked teeth. His graying hair and hazel eyes almost pushed him over the edge between acceptable and not. Olkin’s job had him on the phone nine hours out of every ten hour day. He was the grease between the production companies and the talent. Somehow he managed to stay in great shape despite such a sedentary gig. If it had been the 1980s, he would have done it with cocaine. In 2017, he did it by running. Running was his thing. “Good timing,” he said, sliding her a paper plate and a paper cup across the table. “Coffee, black with a splash of cream. Garden salad—vinaigrette on the side—and a hard-boiled egg.”

  Quinn scrunched her face. “You’re saying I’m a creature of habit…”

  Olkin smiled. “I’m saying you’re predictable to a fault.”

  David had, once upon a time, introduced Henaghan to Noah, her only ex-boyfriend from her tenure in Los Angeles. Noah had been a disaster. She shouldn’t blame Olkin for that, but she
did. Just a little. She took a sip of the coffee. It was black with less than half a teaspoon of milk. Between the properly-ordered lunch and the offer of an interesting tale for her website, Quinn might’ve thought David was trying to woo her. But Olkin was… gay? Actually, she never saw him with or heard him talk about either gender, so she took him to be asexual. A phone-talking, 10k-running asexual. He was also twice her age so she never harbored any sexual thoughts about him. The girl picked up the hard-boiled egg and took a bite. “You said you had something interesting…?”

  Olkin winced. He hated hard-boiled eggs. “Interesting is the right word. Anyway, don’t expect a three-act structure with a character arc and a satisfying climax. You’ll probably have to do some digging.”

  Quinn nodded, indicating she was game.

  Before Olkin could continue, an older man in a suit walked by their table. “Mr. Olkin,” he said. He flicked his eyes to Quinn and smiled.

  “Mr. Nighman,” David returned. “You know Larry Nighman, right?” he said to Henaghan once Suit Man was gone.

  “Only by reputation. Did he really tell Lou Wasserman to go fuck himself?”

  “That’s an urban legend,” Olkin said. “He told Sidney Sheinberg to go fuck himself.”

  Nighman was a literary agent representing some of the best writers in Hollywood. Like Barry Faber, he was a legend at ACT. Also like Faber, he had an acid tongue.

  Olkin looked at his watch. “I’ve got that meeting with Bev in forty minutes. I better cut to the chase.”

  “Don’t dilly dally on my account…”

  Olkin grinned at Henaghan. “‘Dilly dally…’ Who says that? Anywho… Do you remember Greg Beardslee?”

  “You mean Greg-the-Groper Beardslee?”

  David nodded. “Did he ever get you?”

  Quinn shook her head. “I’m too light on my feet.”

  “Good. After Beardslee got shit-canned, I talked to his assistant. Amber… Amber-something, I don’t remember her last name. She went over to William Morris. Anyway, I talked to her and she said Greg-the-Groper cleaned out his office, but he left some stuff.”

  “Dry cleaning? Marital aids?”

  “Close, but no. Coupla things. First: In his coat closet was a black robe made of heavy fabric. Wool or something. In a half circle over the shoulders and across the chest was heavy black embroidery. Get this: interlocking raven heads. Amber said it was ‘Corman-esque’, like something out of one of his Edgar Allen Poe pictures. I thought that was a pretty astute reference. Puts me in the right headspace immediately.”

  “It is an astute reference,” Henaghan said. “Although, to get it, you have to either be in your fifties or be a weirdo mutant like me.”

  “I look good for being in my fifties, though, right?”

  “You’re as fresh as a baby’s bottom.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Me either.”

  Olkin smiled. “Anyhow, so I say to Amber, ‘You can’t hold somebody’s taste in Halloween costumes against them.’ Amber reminded me they let Beardslee go in the middle of February. I decided I’d play devil’s advocate, so I asked her what she thought the robes meant. ‘Maybe Greg was a serial commencement speaker?’, says I. Amber just kinda glares at me—like you’re doing now—and says, ‘That’s not all’. So, second weird thing: Amber said one of Greg’s desk drawers was rattling. Almost like the drawer—or whatever was inside—was trying to get her attention. She opened the drawer and out flew a little blue bird with a bright red head.”

  Quinn was in the middle of unwrapping her plastic fork. She stopped. “A live bird flew out of an agent’s desk? C’mon.”

  Olkin shrugged. “It flew out of the drawer and landed on Greg’s desk calendar. She said it cocked its head and looked at her.”

  “Anything else in the drawer?”

  “Glad you asked. Yes, there was something else in the drawer… A dagger,” Olkin said. “An old, very creepy dagger. Not with a blade, but with two points at the tip. Two long spikes intertwined like snakes, ending in, I guess, fangs.”

  The girl’s eyes lit up. “Man, I’d love to see that,” she said.

  David grinned and picked up the briefcase that sat at his feet. Placing it on the concrete table, he popped the latches. “Christmas in October,” he said. Then he looked around to make sure there were no looky-loos. When he opened the case, Quinn expected it to emit a golden glow from within, like the case from Pulp Fiction. There was no such glow. From out of the case, the agent withdrew a dull gray dagger exactly as he’d described.

  Quinn was tickled. “Talk about Corman-esque. What is it, a movie prop?”

  “Take it,” Olkin said, handing it to her, handle first.

  Henaghan took the dagger and marveled at its heaviness. Most movie props are flimsy since all they have to do is look good on camera. The knife in Quinn’s hands felt like an actual tool a person might use—if that person was a prehistoric druid. “Oh my God,” she said, rolling it from hand to hand.

  “I know, right? Amber gave it to me the day she quit. Called it a lovely parting gift.”

  “You could do some serious damage with this.”

  “No kidding. And it looks old.”

  Quinn held the dagger to her face. The metal was unmarked, but it did have a dullness that spoke of age. From its color and the way it had been crafted, it reminded her of the bird statue from The Maltese Falcon.

  Olin watched Quinn for a moment, enjoying the wonder on her face. “In the drawer, under the dagger, there was a business card. Weird card stock, Amber said. Heavier than usual with an ancient feel and smell. She said it felt like hide rather than paper.”

  “What was on it?”

  “‘R. Verbic’. Above one of those five-pointed star thingies.”

  “A pentagram?”

  “Yeah, only not upside down.”

  “So, magic but not Satan. What’s an R. Verbic?”

  “Another urban legend. That secret fraternity I mentioned—The Guild—it was supposedly founded in the 1920s by a guy named Verbic.”

  “Nothing else on the card? No phone number? No address? No incriminating stains?”

  David’s eyebrows went up. “What’s an incriminating stain?”

  “I dunno. Blood. Semen. Bloody semen.”

  “Ew. On the back, written in pencil, was the phrase, ‘More power to you —B.’ Under that was a drawing of a smiley face.”

  “Fun-loving druids. Who’s B.?”

  “Do I look like a swami to you?”

  “What’d Amber do with the bird?”

  “She held out her finger and the damn thing perched on it.”

  “Shut up!”

  “That’s what she said. Then she opened the window and it flew out.”

  “Too bad. That bird’s a material witness.”

  “Yeah, but it’s no stool pigeon.”

  Henaghan groaned, disgusted.

  David ignored her critique. “I’m gonna need that back,” he said. “I think I wanna get it analyzed.”

  “Analyzed by who?”

  David came up short. “I dunno. A professor. The Chair of Stabby Things at UCLA.”

  “He’s got a PhD in Ouch.” Quinn was reluctant to let the weapon go, but, holding it as Olkin had before, she offered it to him. In taking it, his hand popped forward in the midst of retreating. The two points jabbed into Quinn’s left palm. She withdrew her hand and held it to her, immediately marking her white sweater with red. “Jesus, David!”

  He dropped the knife and leaned toward her. She shrugged off his hands. “God, I’m so sorry!” he said.

  “You are not. You did that on purpose!”

  “I did not! Why would I—“

  “Your hand popped forward!”

  “It didn’t mean to. God, I’m sorry. At least let me see.”

  Quinn clutched her hand closer to her torso. “No!” she said.

  Olkin grabbed her wrist, gentle but firm. “Come on now. You’re being ridiculo
us.” He pulled, trying to make her stand. She resisted. “Come on,” he said. “I don’t think it’s bad but we’ve got to clean it. Get a dressing on it.” He pulled again and this time she stood. He dropped the dagger into his briefcase and picked up the case with his free hand. Leading Quinn by her wrist, David steered them into the building and then into the men’s restroom.

  “We can’t go in here. This is the—”

  But David ignored her. Turning on both knobs in the sink, he pulled her hand away from her body, and forced it under the water. As the blood washed away, two neat but shallow puncture marks appeared. “There, see? It’s not bad. Seriously, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened.” Before she had a chance to answer, he pulled the first aid kit off of the wall. He dropped the briefcase on the floor and, with his free hand, he pulled out a bottle of peroxide and a box of band-aids. He put down the band-aids and, holding the peroxide against his body with his opposite elbow, he unscrewed the little cap. Pulling her hand out of the water, he poured the disinfectant over her damaged palm. She winced but said nothing. Olkin pulled a streamer of paper towels out of the dispenser and dried Henaghan’s hand. Giving her back her wrist, he instructed her to elevate and apply pressure, then he fished through the box of band-aids. It was an assortment pack and he struggled to find a larger one. Succeeding at last, he peeled off the two adhesive strips and stretched the band-aid across Quinn’s injury site. “There,” he said. “Almost good as new.”

  Quinn regarded her hand, concentrating to mask the hurt on her face. “Will I need stitches?”

  “No, Quinn. It’s a couple of nicks. Very, very shallow. You’ll be able to take the band-aid off tomorrow. In fact, you should. I think I heard somewhere that owies prefer fresh air.”

  “Owies?”

  David smiled at her. “That’s right. I gave you two owies.”

  “On purpose!”