Willson Quayle selected one of the female figures and opened the blister pack. “I’d like to introduce you to Star,” he said, setting the figure on its feet on the table.
Although about the same size, height-wise, at least, as a Barbie doll, Star bore no resemblance at all to the willowy Barbie. Star was a squat, awesomely endowed creature, broad of shoulder, deep of chest, narrow of waist, and powerful of thigh, with straight, waist-length, coal-black hair and a fierce expression on her small face. Her costume, which didn’t look especially comfortable, consisted mainly of strategically placed faux leather straps and tiny silvery buckles.
“Of course, the physical proportions are somewhat exaggerated,” Quayle explained.
“No kidding,” Bobbi said, half under her breath.
Quayle opened another package and stood a second female figure beside Star.
“This,” he said proudly, “is Virgin, Star’s sidekick.”
Virgin was equally powerfully built and well endowed. She was dressed in a skimpy black vinyl outfit that might have been a cheerleader’s costume designed for Madonna. Or Barbarella. It consisted of a sturdy uplift bustier — it needed to be sturdy, given what it had to support, or would have, in a real woman, should such an unlikely creature actually exist — a sort of miniskirtcum-breechclout thing cut high on the hips, and knee-high boots. A Batman-like mask obscured the upper half of her face.
“Of the two,” Willson Quayle said, “Virgin’s my favourite.”
I thought I heard Bobbi groan, but it may have been my stomach growling. Personally, I respect a man who takes pride in his work.
“Have either of you seen Star Crossed?” he asked.
I shook my head and Bobbi said, “No.”
“It’s been described as Xena: Warrior Princess meets The Terminator,” Quayle explained. “Star and Virgin are time-travelling bounty hunters who have come to present-day Earth to track down and capture a group of evil shape-shifting alien outlaws. It’s quite original, sexier and more tongue-in-cheek than Xena. Very popular with the twelve-to-twenty-four demographic.”
“I can certainly see why boys like it,” Bobbi said. “Of all ages.”
“Actually, girls like it too. Star and Virgin are, well, quite liberated.”
“I bet,” Bobbi said.
“I’ll leave you some tapes,” Quayle said.
“Oh, goodie,” Bobbi muttered.
I jabbed her with my elbow. Quayle didn’t notice. He looked at his watch.
“She should be here any time now.”
“Who?” I asked.
His face did odd things, as though he were trying to raise his eyebrows, but they remained frozen in place. “You’ll see,” he said mysteriously. Willson Quayle busied himself setting up more action figures on the table, Star and Virgin in different costumes, and a selection of creepy alien outlaws, even more squat and powerful.
“Can I speak with you for a minute?” Bobbi said quietly. We went into my office. “I think we should send this bozo on his way,” she in a low voice.
“We need the work.”
“Not that bad.”
“Oh, yeah? Look, I know they’re kind of tacky, but a job’s a job.”
“Tacky is an understatement,” Bobbi said sourly. “The damned things are practically pornographic. It wouldn’t surprise me if he took them home at night and undressed them.” She heaved a resigned sigh. “Fine, but if he calls me ‘Barbie’ again I’m gonna poke one of those little plastic spears into his eye.”
We went back into the outer office just as the door to the stairwell opened and a woman came into the studio. I didn’t recognize her at first. She was wearing a baggy plain white T-shirt tucked into a faded denim miniskirt. Her legs were long and straight and strong. Her straw-coloured hair was drawn back in a short ponytail, emphasizing her striking, chiselled features. Her deep-set half-moon eyes, surrounded by smile lines, were a bright cornflower blue. She was carrying a shoulder bag that looked large enough to hold most of my wardrobe.
She smiled hugely, eyes crinkling and flashing. “Hi, Tom.”
“Reeny!” I said. “Hey, it’s great to see you.” Irene “Reeny” Lindsey was an actress — pardon me, an actor — I’d known for a couple of years. I hadn’t seen her in almost a year, though, not since I’d helped her move the old sailboat on which she lived from the marina in Coal Harbour to its winter mooring on the Fraser River, where the fresh water killed the saltwater toredo worms that invaded the wood hull during the summer.
“You two know each other?” Willson Quayle said, surprise in his voice if not his face.
“Sure,” Reeny said. “We’re old friends.” She put slight emphasis on the word “old.”
“Wait a second,” I said, having noticed that Reeny looked quite buff, much more so than when I’d last seen her. She wasn’t as developed — some would say overdeveloped — as a female bodybuilder, but it was obvious that she’d been working out. A lot. “Reeny, you aren’t — are you?”
“Tom, Barbie,” Willson Quayle said. Did Reeny stiffen slightly as he laid his arm across her wide shoulders? If so, he didn’t notice. “Meet Virgin.”
“His Botox injections haven’t just paralyzed his face,” Bobbi said later, after Willson Quayle had left. “I think they’ve paralyzed his brain as well.”
Reeny giggled. Giggly women usually annoy me, but Reeny’s giggle was throaty and full of mischief. “I know what you mean,” she said. “He is rather dense, isn’t he? Ricky — that’s Richenda Rice, who plays Star — she calls him One-Way Willie. Lots of stuff comes out, but nothing much goes in. Not to his face, of course. His company is a major sponsor.”
“His company?” I said.
“The company he works for,” Reeny amended. “Rainy Day Toys. He’s the senior account manager in the marketing department. Most of the women I work with think he’s drop-dead gorgeous, but, well, he creeps me out. Maybe it’s the Botox,” she added with an exaggerated shudder.
“You don’t use that stuff, do you?” Bobbi asked.
“Botox?” Reeny smiled, cheeks dimpling, eyes crinkling. “Does it look like it?”
“You look great, actually,” Bobbi said.
“Yeah, you do,” I added. “Very, um, fit.”
“You guys are great for the old ego,” Reeny said, colouring slightly. “How ’bout I take you to a late lunch?” she added. “My treat.”
“Uh, I wish we could accept,” I said. “But we’ve got a shoot this afternoon.” I looked at my watch. It was almost one. “We should get cracking.”
“I’ve got nothing on this afternoon,” Reeny said. “Do you mind if I tag along? That is, as long as you’re not going to be hanging from a helicopter under the Lions Gate Bridge or anything silly like that.”
She was referring to a photograph I had taken in the spring of a pair of workers dangling by their safety lan-yards beneath the Lions Gate Bridge after their scaffold had collapsed in sudden high winds. It had been shot from Wes Camacho’s helicopter from under the bridge. I’d been contracted to take some aerial photos of the harbour area, the bulk yards on the north shore, and had hired Wes and his chopper. We were calling it a day because of the winds when we saw the scaffolding collapse and plummet into the water two hundred feet below. Wes hovered under the bridge, while the winds beat at the helicopter, relaying information to the rescue crews. The photograph had earned me an award and a fair bit of free publicity. Wes and I had also shared a citation for bravery from Vancouver Fire & Rescue. Truth be known, though, I’d been scared half to death, had kept shooting simply as a distraction.
“Nothing like that,” I said. “We’re shooting the board of directors of West Coast Hotels for their annual report this afternoon. In their boardroom.”
“I could schlep for you.”
I looked hopefully at Bobbi.
“Why not?” she said with a wry smile. “Save me from having to do all the schlepping.”
Thank you, I thought gratefully.
&nbs
p; “But, um,” Bobbi said.
“What?” Reeny asked. Bobbi was looking at Reeny’s long, bare legs. “Oh.”
“I might have a pair of sweats that will fit you.”
“Not to worry,” Reeny said, and pulled a pair of jeans out of her huge bag.
“Will Quayle implied that your show’s pretty popular,” I said. “You’re not worried about being mobbed by your fans? Or being seen in the company of dull normals?”
“Speak for yourself,” Bobbi said.
“Star Crossed isn’t that popular,” Reeny said. “Not yet, anyway. And I doubt it’d have many fans on the board of directors of West Coast Hotels. Besides, I’m not very recognizable. In addition to my character’s, um, physical enhancements, she wears a mask in a lot of scenes, and when she isn’t wearing a mask, her hair is short and red and her eyes are yellow. We’re only just starting our second season and, so far at least, I’ve managed to retain my anonymity. If it takes off, though, that might not last. I’m not sure how I feel about it.” She looked at Bobbi. “Tom can tell you, I’m a very private person.”
Reeny changed into the jeans and Bobbi loaned her a spare vest, so she’d look the part. We gobbled a quick lunch from the Chinese bakery across the street, then loaded the cameras, tripods, light stands, reflectors, cables, and portable seamless backdrop into the van and were on our way by two.
“What happened to your old Land Rover?” Reeny asked. She was sitting up front with Bobbi while I sat on the equipment case welded into the back of the big Dodge Ram van, clinging for dear life to the seat backs.
“I let Bobbi drive it,” I said. “She killed it.”
“Put it out of its misery, more like,” Bobbi retorted.
“And your Porsche,” Reeny said. “Do you still have that?”
“Yes,” I said. The Porsche was an ’84 fire-engine red Carrera 911 that I’d acquired a few years earlier in lieu of payment from a client whose “pre-owned” luxury car business had fallen on hard times. It was great fun to drive, especially on the winding roads of the Sunshine Coast, but it was totally impractical for work and spent most of its life in the lock-up I rented in the boat works shed at the west end of Granville Island. “I’m thinking of selling it, though. Know anyone who might be interested?”
“I might be.”
“Oops,” I said.
“What?”
“I have a rule, never sell a used car to a friend, especially a friend you want to keep. Anyway, it’s never been quite the same since Vince Ryan stripped the gearbox.”
“Too bad,” Reeny said.
During the shoot someone did in fact recognize Reeny. Not from Star Crossed, though, but from a recurring minor role she’d had in The X-Files, when it was still being shot in Vancouver. I’d worried a little that Reeny might prove to be more hindrance than help, but I needn’t have. She seemed to know her way around cameras, which shouldn’t have surprised me, but did.
“I enjoy the technical aspects of filmmaking,” she told us later. “I’d like to go into production someday. Acting is fun, most of the time, but I’m no Kate Hepburn. When my looks and my figure, such as they are, are gone, so is my acting career. Who cares if the producer or director is wrinkly and grey with sagging boobs?”
“I like her,” Bobbi said after we dropped Reeny off on our way back to the studio.
“Me too,” I said.
“No kidding.”
“Do you still want to send One-Way Willie packing?”
“Him, yes. The job, no. I have a feeling working with Reeny could be fun.”
“Me too,” I said.
chapter three
“I think that covers just about everything,” Willson Quayle said a few minutes before ten Tuesday morning. He ran his finger down his neatly bulleted list of topics on the pad in front of him, then looked up. “When do you think you’ll be able to get back to me with an estimate of costs and a schedule of deliverables?”
I glanced at my own scribbled notes, which were strewn chaotically across four and a half pages of yellow legal foolscap. “I should be able to have a preliminary estimate for you by the end of the day,” I said off the top of my head. “Or first thing in the morning,” I added.
“Because,” Willson Quayle said, as though he hadn’t heard a word I’d said, “we’d like to have the site up and running by American Thanksgiving, in time for the Christmas shopping season. A lot of the basic design, layout and so forth, has already been done. All you have to worry about is the content and putting it all together so that it can be converted to HTML. Our people will tweak the final code.”
“Um, listen,” I said. “When you first approached me with this, it was with the understanding that all we’d be doing was product photography. I don’t have a problem with the film set and location photography, we’ve done a fair amount of that, but I’m afraid streaming video and audio and web page construction are way outside our area of expertise.” Not to mention computer capacity. The newest computer we had was the two-year-old Macintosh that was part of the digital camera set-up and pretty much dedicated to that function. The next most recent was a five-year-old PowerBook I’d bought to replace the one Carla Bergman had stolen.
“You can subcontract that work out if you like,” Quayle replied. “Or bring in temporary expertise. But what I’m looking for, Tom, is a one-stop, full-service shop. I don’t want to have to deal with a bunch of different suppliers on this. Frankly, Tom, if you don’t think you can handle this, you’re putting me in a bind, time-wise. The fourth Thursday in November isn’t that far off.”
Don’t I know it, I thought. “All right,” I said. “Let me talk to some people. I’ll get back to you by the end of the day, first thing in the morning at the latest.”
Quayle’s mouth stretched in a smile. I found the immobility of the upper half of his face unnerving. “The sooner you can give us a firm cost estimate and delivery schedule,” he said, “the sooner we can get the lawyers to work on the contract.”
“How long do you expect that to take?” I asked, wary at the mention of lawyers.
“You know lawyers,” Quayle said with a shrug. “It could take a couple of weeks.”
“Weeks,” I said, dismayed. “If we have to wait two weeks to start the work, it’s going to be damned hard to make the deadline. As you said, the fourth Thursday in November is not that far off.”
The corners of Willson Quayle’s mouth turned down in a frown. “It’d be impossible,” he said. “And if we miss the deadline, well, I don’t much relish the prospect of being unemployed. And, if I know lawyers, they’ll build in penalty clauses that could end up costing you plenty if you don’t deliver on time. You’re just going to have to take it on faith, I’m afraid, and start right away.”
Or tell you to take a hike, I thought sourly. Talk of penalty clauses made me nervous. And maybe I wasn’t the most astute businessman in the world, but I hadn’t stayed in business for eight years by taking a lot on faith. While I considered myself a reasonably trusting person, the operative word being “reasonably,” I wasn’t stupid. Well, not that stupid.
Willson Quayle leaned across my desk and, looking conspiratorially to the left and the right, motioned me closer. “My boss,” he said in a low voice. “If she finds out I told you what I’m about to tell you, I’ll be up shit creek without a bucket for sure. You have to give me your word that you’ll keep this to yourself. Don’t even tell Barbie.” He leaned closer still. “You aren’t the first shop we’ve approached. I won’t name names, but the first outfit, they screwed us royally, just took the money and ran. My boss’s ass is on the line. So’s mine. The company spent a fortune acquiring the merchandising rights to Star Crossed, and even more on the advertising campaign, which starts the first week of October, when the new season premieres. If I can pull this off, my boss will come out of it smelling like roses. And me along with her. If I can’t, well, my boss will go back to the mail room, and I’ll be out beating the bushes for a new job.” He sat back
and shrugged. “The point being, Tom, you’ve pretty much got us over a barrel. My boss will approve any reasonable proposal.”
“Well,” I said dubiously.
“That-a-boy,” Quayle said. “I knew I could count on you.” He gathered his notes into a neat stack and put them into his briefcase. “Say, Tom,” he said, as he closed his briefcase, “how long have you known Irene Lindsey?”
“Reeny? Two years. Why?”
“Do you know her very well?”
“No, not really,” I said.
“So you wouldn’t know if she was seeing anyone?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” I said, although I didn’t think she was. Or perhaps that was just wishful thinking. “Have a nice day, Will.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Bobbi said. “Call him up this very minute and tell him we’re not interested. Jesus, have you been taking Botox injections too?” She dropped with a grunt and a twang of springs onto the old leather sofa. “Sorry, but I don’t know how can you trust that smarmy creep.” She made a sound deep in her throat, as though she were getting reading to spit. “He’s so utterly slimy. Can’t even get my goddamned name right.”
“I don’t trust him,” I said. “At least, not completely. But don’t you think you’re overreacting just a little? I haven’t committed us to anything except a few hours of our time to write the proposal. And if they’re as desperate as he says they are, they should be willing to advance us some money to upgrade the computer equipment and bring in some temporary help.”
“And if they aren’t?”
“Then we tell them to take a hike, all right?”
“Well…”
“Look, we’ll write as much protection as we can into the proposal. Scope. Assumptions. All that weasel-ly legal stuff you’re so fond of. And we’ll get the Griz to look it over, make sure we’re bulletproof.” The Griz was our lawyer, Glenda Gilbert.
Overexposed Page 3
