“There’s no such thing as bulletproof when lawyers are involved,” Bobbi said. She heaved a sigh. “We’d need a high-speed Internet connection.” She’d been after me for months to upgrade our dial-up service. So had our service provider, who wanted money.
“Swell. Like I don’t get enough junk mail as it is, half of it from the bastard son, mistress, widow, or second cousin of a former Nigerian government official who’d absconded with the national treasury, promising me a fat percentage to help transfer it out of the country.”
Bobbi sighed again. “Is that a yes?”
“I suppose.”
“All right, let’s get to work.”
We spent the afternoon working on the proposal. By four o’clock, we had a number upon which we both agreed.
“Okay,” Bobbi said. “Now double that.”
“They’ll never agree to that,” I protested.
“Fine,” she replied. “Then they don’t. In fact, I’m hoping they won’t. And I think we should ask for a third up front. If we’re going to put our lives on hold for the next six weeks, let’s at least make it worth our while.”
“Whatever you say,” I said.
We agreed to sleep on it before faxing it to Quayle’s office, but we faxed a copy to the Griz. Quayle had left half a dozen tapes of the show, so I suggested we relax with a beer and watch one or two. Bobbi got a couple of beers out of the film fridge while I set up the little combination TV/VCR on a corner of my desk. We sat side by side on the sofa, feet up on the magazine-strewn coffee table. I pressed the play button on the remote.
Star Crossed, quite simply, stank. The writing was lame, the internal logic riddled with holes, and the humour, such as there was any, was juvenile at best. The computer-generated special effects were cheesy and the fight scenes weren’t even remotely convincing. How the astonishingly statuesque Richenda Rice, a.k.a. Star, managed to actually stay inside her costume of straps and buckles during the fight scenes reminded me of old-time movie cowboys whose hats somehow always stayed on, despite fist fights, falling from horses, or plunging off cliffs into raging rivers. Soon we were fast-forwarding through the action sequences, returning to normal speed whenever the characters, most of whom looked faintly embarrassed by the whole ordeal, engaged in dialogue. However, the dialogue was so utterly inane and frequently completely pointless, contributing little or nothing to the story, that we ended up fast-forwarding through it as well, without losing the thread of the plot, such as there was one.
After zipping through three episodes, we’d both seen enough. All the storylines seemed to revolve around attempts by various alien bad guys to deflower Virgin. What made it particularly intriguing was that under their human guises the villains were supposed to be scaly, lizard-like creatures whose biology, not to mention physiology, made a successful union highly improbable, not to say uncomfortable. What a warty-skinned, goggle-eyed lizard thing saw in a leggy and buxom human female was also a complete mystery. Invariably, however, Reeny’s character was kidnapped, bound and gagged, and her costume, what little there was of it in the first place, cunningly and strategically disarrayed, as much by her abductors’ misguided attentions as by Star’s inevitable but rather clumsy and inept rescue.
For the most part, despite the atrocious dialogue, the acting was competent, although perhaps I was lacking in objectivity. Had I not known it was Reeny playing the role of Virgin, though, I wouldn’t have recognized her. Even knowing, I found it difficult to see past the makeup, costume, and physical augmentations. Even her voice seemed different. Nevertheless, I thought she was wonderful.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Bobbi said. “Reeny’s a sweetheart, and maybe she’d do better with a decent role, but she’s got the right idea, going into production.”
I rewound the tape while Bobbi sat on the sofa finishing her beer. As I ejected the tape from the TV, D. Wayne Fowler came into my office.
“Here are your prints,” he said, handing me the envelopes from the photo finisher. He had a small, colourful gift bag in his other hand.
“Thanks,” I said. I put the prints on my desk.
Wayne was twenty-six, but looked younger. Equally at home with both traditional and digital photography, he was plump and earnest, sometimes too earnest. He’d been with us for six months, during which time he had developed, if you’ll pardon the expression, a desperate crush on Bobbi.
“Hey, are these from the new season?” he asked, picking up one of the Star Crossed videocassettes.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I doubt it.”
“Do you think it would be okay if I borrowed them?” he asked.
“I don’t see why not.”
“What’s that you’ve got there, D. Wayne?” Bobbi asked. She ran his initial and name together, making it sound like Duane — or Dwayne, as our American cousins prefer — spoken with two syllables — Duh-Wayne. I didn’t know what the “D” actually stood for. For all I knew, his first name really was Duane. Or Dwayne. Which would have made him Duane Wayne Fowler. If so, his parents should have been flogged.
Wayne blushed deeply. “I-I-I saw this w-w-when I w-w-was out picking up the p-p-prints,” he stammered. He never stammered when he spoke to me, but around Bobbi he became almost incoherent. “It’s f-f-for you,” he said, and thrust the gift bag toward Bobbi.
Bobbi accepted the bag, from which she removed a small teddy bear wearing a natty little photographer’s vest and carrying a tiny Nikon camera.
“Why, thank you, D. Wayne,” she said, beaming at him. She stood and kissed him on the cheek. He turned so red in the face I thought his heart would burst.
“Y-y-you’re wel-c-c-come,” he said and fled from the office, clutching the Star Crossed tapes to his bosom.
“There’s a rude name for women who tease men like that,” I said. “Especially men like Wayne.”
“Slap me,” Bobbi replied, abashed. “I just can’t seem to help myself.” She picked up one of the envelopes of prints. “Let’s see if your dead guy is here,” she said.
He wasn’t. There was a nice picture of Kevin Ferguson, though, with his hand on my sister Mary-Alice’s backside and a beatific grin on his face. There was another good one of Mary-Alice punching him in the stomach. He wasn’t smiling in that one.
So who the hell was the dead guy? I searched my memory again for any recollection of him, either at the party or elsewhere, but again came up empty. I was as certain as I could be that I’d never met him, and it spooked me more than a little that a man I didn’t know from Adam had crashed my birthday party and had died there. Despite what I’d told Daniel about letting the police handle it, as I rode the ferry across False Creek toward home I composed a mental list of some more people to talk to who’d been at the party and might have spoken to him. I owed him at least that much, whoever he was.
Upon reaching Granville Island, I took a short detour along Old Bridge Street to Railspur Alley and dropped into Tilda Rideout’s gallery. Tilda and her husband, Floyd, had been at the party. Both in their eighties, they looked every bit the archetypal eccentric Brit couple they were. Tilda was a painter and Floyd had taught philosophy and comparative religion at UBC until forced into retirement a few years before. When I went into the tiny gallery, Floyd was in his usual place, dozing in the old overstuffed easy chair by the window.
“Hi, Floyd,” I said.
He raised his head and peered at me through the Coke-bottle lenses of his glasses. “Hello,” he said uncertainly. He wore a shapeless Tilley hat that looked as though it had been through the digestive track of an elephant one too many times.
“It’s Tom McCall, Floyd.”
“Is it?” He levered himself out of the chair and got to his feet, a gaunt, tweedy scarecrow of a man. “Can I show you anything? Tilda’s not here.” He flapped a long arm in the direction of the wall upon which a half-dozen of Tilda’s paintings were hung.
“Not today,” I said. I had one of Tilda’s paintings. One was enough. Not that they weren�
��t good paintings. They were. They were just all of them virtually identical, colourful scenes of Granville Island that the tourists snapped up like candy.
I took the photograph out of my pocket. It had been taken with one of the single-use cameras. In it, an elderly woman with a nimbus of frizzy white hair appeared to be talking to a man who was mostly hidden behind the gangly figure of Floyd. All that was visible of the man was the back of an iron grey head and a length of arm clad in blue serge. I handed the photograph to Floyd, who raised it to within an inch or two of his left eye, then lowered it. He cocked a raggedy white eyebrow at me.
“Do you remember the man Tilda is talking to?” I asked him, pointing to the photograph.
He lifted it to his eye again, examined it briefly, then lowered it again. “’Fraid not,” he said. “But the memory isn’t what it used to be, is it? Remember having a rather tedious conversation with the chap whose party it was, though. Quite inebriated, he was.”
“It was my party, Floyd.”
“Was it? Oh. Well, Winnie should be back soon. Perhaps she will remember.”
“Winnie?”
“My wife. Short for Winifred.”
“Your wife’s name is Tilda.”
“Is it? Oh. Yes. That’s right. Short for Matilda. Who’s Winnie then?”
“She’s your sister, dear,” Tilda Rideout said as she came into the gallery. She had a painting under each arm. She put them down on a bench.
“Is she?” Floyd said. “Oh, dear. Done it again, haven’t I? Ah — I’m sorry, what did you say your name was again?”
“It’s Tom McCall, dear,” Tilda said before I could answer. “We were at his party the other night.”
“Oh? Were we?”
“Yes, dear.”
He handed the photograph to Tilda and, without another word, shambled off into a back room.
Tilda smiled up at me, eyes bright and clear. “Floyd isn’t quite as far gone as he pretends to be,” she said. “He just likes giving people the piss.” She looked at the photograph in her hand, then at me.
“Do you remember the man you were talking to when that was taken?”
She examined the photograph for a long moment, a look of concentration on her sun-browned and wrinkled face. She resembled one of those dolls you see at handi-crafts fairs whose faces are made from old pantyhose. “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” she said at last. “Goodness, you don’t think it was the poor sod who died, do you?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Sorry,” she said.
A woman wearing huge, wraparound sunglasses, a big floppy hat, and flowered Bermuda shorts came into the gallery. I bid Tilda good day and left. When I got home I found an envelope with my name typed on it taped to the front door of my house. Inside the envelope there was a twenty-dollar bill and a hand-written note: “For your pants. B.C.” I pocketed the money and tossed the envelope and note into the recycling bin. When was the last time Barry had bought a pair of long pants? I wondered.
The message light on the kitchen phone was flashing. I pressed the appropriate buttons, keyed in the appropriate password, and was informed in sultry mechanical tones that I had one new message. I was then instructed to press 1-1 to hear it. I missed my old answering machine, even though by the time I’d chucked it, it had sounded like a cat being slowly strangled to death when it played messages back.
“Hi, Tom,” Reeny’s voice said. “It’s Reeny. I just wanted to call to thank you and tell you how much I enjoyed yesterday afternoon. It was fun. And Bobbi’s terrific.” There was some shouting in the background. “Gotta go. Call me later. I should be home by seven. Bye.”
I deleted the message and hung up. It was not quite quarter past six. Surrendering to the impetuous romantic in me, I grabbed a quick shower, put on clean underwear, and by seven o’clock was loitering by the gate to the Harbour Ferries Marina in Coal Harbour when a massive black Ford Expedition pulled up and Reeny climbed down from the high cab. She was wearing scuffed but sturdy hiking boots, trim, tailored walking shorts, and a dirty, sweat-stained beige safari shirt with epaulets and lots of pockets, sleeves rolled high on her lean, muscular arms. The shirt seemed a few sizes too large, particularly in the chest area. I supposed she’d removed her fake Virgin boobs before leaving the studio.
“S’all right, Wally,” she told the driver. “He’s a friend.” She swung the door closed and the big SUV glided away. “This is a pleasant surprise,” she said with a bright smile.
“I hope you don’t mind,” I said.
“Not at all.” Her straw-coloured hair was loose and the breeze blew it across her face. She pulled a strand from her mouth. “Better stay upwind, though; I stink to high heaven. We were shooting a jungle scene and it was steamy as hell on the set. The director, who used to make rock videos or beer commercials or something, has this thing about authenticity. He likes to see real sweat. Fine for him. All he does is sit on his skinny butt and shout directions.”
As I followed her through the gate and down the ramp onto the floating docks of the marina, I caught a whiff of her, rich and ripe and musky, but not at all unpleasant. In fact, I found it quite stimulating. Oh-oh, I thought. When I start finding sweaty, muscular women sexually attractive, I know I’m in serious trouble.
“I thought maybe I could take you to dinner,” I said.
“That’s very kind of you,” she said. “But to be honest, I’m totally bagged. I just want a glass of wine, a shower, and a pizza, in that order. You’re welcome to join me, though.”
“I just took a shower,” I said. “Another wouldn’t hurt, I suppose.”
“I meant the pizza and the wine,” she said with a grin.
“Oh,” I said, feigning disappointment. “I knew that.”
We arrived at the slip in which she moored Pendragon, the old sixty-foot Bradley custom sloop on which she lived — illegally, I might add, since the marina wasn’t zoned for living aboard. Lots of people did, though, maintaining an on-shore address where they technically spent at least one night a month. Reeny had a little house in Ladner, not far from where she wintered Pendragon. She lived there November through February, renting it out the rest of the year, mostly to people in the film and TV industry.
“The old girl’s looking good,” I said.
“Thanks,” Reeny said. She flashed me a coy smile. “Oh, you mean Pendragon. It takes a lot to keep her — and me — in shape these days. Neither of us is getting any younger.”
“Well, you both seem to be doing just fine.”
“You smooth-talking devil,” she said. “You really know how to turn a girl’s head.”
We went aboard. A huge arrangement of tropical flowers wrapped in clear cellophane stood in a vase by the pilothouse hatch.
“Oh, hell,” Reeny groaned.
“Do you have a secret admirer?”
“Not so secret,” she said, removing the card and handing it to me without reading it.
The flowers were from Willson Quayle. “To my favourite Virgin,” the card read. “Let’s do it again soon. Call me.” It was signed with a florid “Will” and included a telephone number and email address.
“Oh, god,” she said, perhaps reading something in my face. “What does it say?” I handed her the card. She read it, then crumpled it in her fist. “I had dinner with him last night. The producer’s idea, not mine. He likes to keep the sponsors happy. I think he and Will are old pals and Will’s been after me for weeks to go out with him. So…” Her voice faltered, red blooming on her cheekbones.
“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” I said.
“I wasn’t explaining myself,” she said. “Well, maybe I was. It’s just that I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea.”
What was the right idea? I wondered. “I have to admit, he’s got good taste,” I said.
“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” she said, picking up the flowers and unlocking the hatch to the pilot-house. I hadn’t been referring to the flowe
rs, of course.
We went below. Standing the flowers on the chart table, she went into the small galley and took a bottle of white wine out of the under-the-counter fridge.
“Here,” she said, handing me the bottle. “Open this and pour a couple of glasses.” She went into the forward stateroom while I opened the wine. A minute later, she came out of the stateroom barefoot, wrapped in a big white terry robe, with her hair pinned up, emphasizing the strong lines and angles of her face.
“Thanks,” she said when I handed her a glass. She took a gulp, then said, “Why don’t you order the pizza while I take my shower.”
“Spinach, broccoli, and mushroom, with extra cheese.”
“You remember,” she said.
She went into the head to shower and I ordered a half-and-half pizza, vegetarian for her, all-dressed for me. When she came out of the head, hair damp, still wrapped in the big terry robe, she smelled of floral soap and baby powder, not quite as stimulating as her natural scent, but nonetheless pleasant. Her wineglass was empty, so I refilled it, and she took it into the master stateroom. She emerged a few minutes later dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with the Star Crossed logo on the back. Her wineglass was half empty. Or half full, depending on your perspective.
“One-Way Willie left some tapes of the show,” I said.
“Did you watch them?”
“Um, yes, sort of.”
“Pretty dreadful, eh?”
I hemmed and hawed, then hemmed some more, not sure what to say.
“Don’t worry,” she said with a smile. “You won’t hurt my feelings. I know it’s awful. We all do. Most of us, anyway. Kenny Shapiro, the director, thinks it’s the best thing since the original Star Trek. The principal writer, too. He’s about fifteen, I think.”
We stayed below, chatting and drinking white wine. She told me about her dinner date with Quayle. I was guiltily pleased that she hadn’t enjoyed it. “He couldn’t seem to keep his hands off me,” she said, demonstrating. “He kept touching my arm, my leg, my shoulder. And after boring me almost catatonic with these incredibly dull stories about the toy business, he seemed genuinely shocked that I didn’t go home with him.”
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