by Al Roker
“There’s only one problem,” I said. “What’s the first rule of Fight Club?”
“ ‘You do not talk about Fight Club,’ ” he replied, repeating the quote made famous by the Brad Pitt–Edward Norton cult movie. “Touché, Billy. I dig. You don’t want to talk about it. Fair enough. We’ll just let everybody else talk about it. Whet their appetites for the book. This project is gonna rock.”
I clicked the phone shut, wondered if there was even a remote possibility of that being true.
I’d finished dressing and was slipping my feet into my shoes when Des knocked on the door. To my surprise, he looked bright-eyed and spruced up in a black silk shirt and neatly pressed black slacks. The only outward remnant of his rough night was a flesh-colored adhesive that masked his damaged knuckles.
“I’m heading out now to meet up with a camera crew,” he said. “We’ll be filmin’ the rest of the day and on into the night, gettin’ footage to open the show and bookend th’ commercial breaks. Fitz’s got a coffeepot goin’ in the villa, if you’re interested.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I could use a cup.”
“I guess I sounded like a mope last night, all that depressin’ talk,” he said. “Don’t give it a second’s thought, Billy. I was just bein’ Irish. We got more mood swings than a ladies’ baseball team.”
He gave me a wide grin, turned, and departed, leaving me with, “And isn’t it a grand day today?”
That remained to be seen.
Again, the “Frim-Fram Sauce” intro. This time it was the coproducer of our cooking show on the Wine & Dine Net, Lily Conover, offering the suggestion that we pitch a new reality series, Battle with Blessing, in which I take on a new opponent each week. “In the pilot we could have you wrestle an alligator,” she said, barely able to keep from giggling. Nice that I was bringing joy to so many.
As I was about to stroll over to the villa to investigate the coffee situation, Cassandra called to report on the day’s luncheon business at Blessing’s Bistro. It sounded fine to me, but she considered it merely adequate. She ended with the request that I “try to remain sober and noncombative, if not for your own sake, for the sake of the bistro that bears your name.”
Fitzpatrick was in the kitchen, bent over the dishwasher, studying its operating buttons. He pressed one of them, then closed the stainless-steel front panel. He turned, saw me, and gave me a halfhearted smile. “Des ain’t here,” he said. “Workday.”
“I know. He stopped by the coach house. Mentioned something about coffee?”
“Just made a second pot,” he said, indicating the carafe sitting on the stovetop, as he sat down at the table. “An’ there’re some sinkers on the counter near the dishes.”
Watching me fill my cup, he added, “I’m headin’ out, too. Meetin’ up with a couple local musicians. Slaughter says he wants a full, rich sound. Like he’d know that from hail hittin’ a tin roof.”
I plucked a chocolate doughnut from the box and carried it and the coffee to a seat across from him. Wondering why I didn’t just tape the doughnut to my waist, I said, “So you’re not too impressed by our producer.”
“When you got respect for the man callin’ the shots, the load seems lighter. There’s gonna be a lot of heavy liftin’ on that set, believe me.”
“Des seemed pretty chipper,” I said.
Fitz nodded his shaggy head. “Man’s got the constitution of a well-oiled machine,” he said. Then he mumbled something half under his breath, a moment later adding, “Forget I said that, will ya, Billy?”
“Did you say anything?”
His smile wasn’t quite hidden beneath his beard. “When I leave, you’re gonna be stranded here without wheels,” he said. “Want me to order up a limo?”
I thanked him for offering but assured him I wouldn’t be needing a limousine.
“Well, I better get inta gear,” he said, pushing his chair back and standing. “Have a good day.”
He lumbered into the other room.
I chomped my chocolate sinker, washed it down with coffee, and pondered the words he’d mumbled barely loud enough for me to hear. After commenting that his best mate had the disposition of a well-oiled machine, he’d added, “And a heart to match.”
Chapter
TEN
I’d left my annoying phone in the coach house.
In the brief period of time I spent at the villa, several calls had come in. None required a reply. I sincerely hoped that the next time I was attacked by a madman, it would be in a camera-free location.
When the ringtone sounded yet another time, I answered it with a gruff “What now?”
“H-hello … Is this Chef Blessing?” The voice was female, barely audible, and hesitant.
“I’m Blessing,” I said. “Sorry if I startled you.”
“I … I’m Whisper Jansen.”
Whisper, a name both weird and aurally appropriate. “What can I do for you?”
“I-I’m Carmen Sandoval’s assistant. At Worldwide West.”
“Right. Gretchen Di Voss said I’d be hearing from Carmen.”
“She’s hoping you might be able to meet with her this evening? At five?”
“Sure. Where?”
“Here at WBCW. Do you have the address?”
I told her I had it. “How do I find her office?”
“We’re on the second floor of the Harold Di Voss Building. I’ll come down to reception and guide you up.”
I told her that would be fine.
By three-forty-five my Internet fame seemed to have dwindled to the point where nary a single self-styled comedian chose to bend my ear with an unfunny quip at my expense. I celebrated by taking a stroll to a car rental agency on the Pacific Coast Highway that I’d spied yesterday on the drive in.
What I’d spied, actually, was a bright red Lexus hardtop convertible that seemed to be crying out, “You’re the only person on the West Coast cool enough to be driving me.” But I did not indulge myself by renting it. Actually, someone cooler had beaten me to it. I had to settle for a second-best indulgence, the same car in gray.
It said to me, “Why settle for cheap flash, a confident man of action like you?”
After scraping away a millimeter of my Worldwide Broadcasting credit card’s information strip, the rental agent escorted me to the sparkling-clean car, where he began uttering a litany of its special features. Only a few of them permeated the fog that develops in my head whenever anyone is speaking technology. “The Lexus model number something … blah-blah-blah … goes from zero to sixty in five-point-eight seconds … blah-blah-blah … electronically controlled transmission … retractable hardtop … blah-blah-blah … HDD navigation system with touch-screen capability—”
“Hold it,” I said. “That last thing. It tells me how to get places, right? That’s the one I want you to explain in detail.”
Another twenty minutes and I was zooming south along the Pacific Coast Highway, with at least a rudimentary knowledge of the ways of the navigation system. The top was down, the windows down, the Shirelles were harmonizing on “Baby It’s You” and other hits from a best-of disc, thanks to a golden oldies channel on Sirius Satellite Radio. I was beginning to remember what a dreamland L.A. had been before Victor Anisette fired me and Roger threatened my life.
The warmth of the afternoon sun and the cool ocean breeze combined to produce the perfect temperature. The sky was a soft blue dotted by puffy white clouds. And the Lexus obeyed my every whim as I guided it through the gathering going-home traffic. In New York, I had a driver, and if he wasn’t available, I caught a cab or walked. It had been years since I’d been behind the wheel of a car, and never one that was such a pleasure to drive.
From time to time, the efficient but creepily unemotional female voice of the navigation system told me where and when to turn. Eventually, with the Santa Monica Pier jutting out into the ocean on my far right, the voice interrupted the Shirelles long enough to advise me to “turn left onto the I-ten.”
I glanced at the active map on the dash, where a little bug—representing the Lexus with me in it—floated along like a mouthless Pac-Man. It showed that the Pacific Coast Highway melded into the Santa Monica Freeway, the I-10, and that all I had to do was keep following the road.
Easier said than done.
The traffic was the problem. A thick stream of it flowed in from the south, slowing all the lanes to a crawl. It was some forty-five minutes of agonizingly slow progress later when my helpful disembodied female voice ordered me to take the Normandie exit. I traveled on that street until the Worldwide Broadcasting West lot showed itself and I was given the final audio benediction, “You have arrived.”
Compared to the company’s towering East Coast headquarters—a sixty-five-floor skyscraper in the heart of Manhattan known locally as the Glass Tower—its West Coast center was almost a ground-hugger, at only five floors. But what it lost in height, it made up for with width, its offices and studios forming an L surrounded by what seemed like a never-ending lot jammed with parked cars.
In addition to the vehicles that belonged to company employees, there were a couple hundred more driven in by members of various studio audiences. While most of the network’s filmed dramas and comedies were created on sound stages in its studio complex in the San Fernando Valley, the quiz and participation shows, such as Take Your Pick and Are You Smarter Than a Runway Model?, and some live telecasts, including news specials, were handled in the longer section of the L.
At that particular time of evening, parking spaces were as hard to find as unaugmented breasts in this godforsaken land.
I finally found a temporary home for the Lexus at the far end of the lot. When I arrived at the reception area of the Harold DiVoss Building, I was winded and perspiring from the cross-lot run but still, as Whisper Jansen informed me in her sotto voce manner, fifteen minutes late.
She stood beside me at the elevator, petite with shoulder-length blond hair combed back from a pale, heart-shaped face that, while attractive, would have benefited from just a little more makeup and a little less anxiety. She was wearing a zippered beige blouse over loose-fitting jeans that she’d rolled to an inch or so above the ankle. Her tiny feet were encased in beige canvas high-tops with white rubber soles.
She chewed the inside of her mouth as we waited for the elevator to arrive. “Carmen was wondering where you were,” she said, her voice rising to an almost audible pitch, her eyes shifting nervously to me and then back to the closed elevator door.
“There was a line of traffic coming in from the beach,” I said. “And then I spent the last fifteen minutes driving around the lot, hunting for a parking place.”
She seemed to sink within herself. “They were supposed to send you to the reserved parking, right in front.”
The elevator arrived, unloading a group of mainly young office workers who were calling it a day. “I can state unreservedly that that didn’t happen,” I said. “I’m way over by the fence.”
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “Sorry you were inconvenienced. Carmen will say it’s my fault.”
She was silent for a beat. Then, as the elevator stopped at our floor, Whisper Jansen took a deep breath, straightened her backbone, and said, “Well, heck. It’ll be just one more tirade.”
“Tirade,” I said. “An attack on a haberdashery.”
Her giggle sounded more like a gurgle. “Daffy Definitions,” she said. “I remember them from when I was a kid.”
“Monastery,” I said. “A place where monsters are kept.”
Grinning, we exited the elevator, moved quickly past a receptionist, who was straightening her desktop, then down a hall with walls filled by framed portraits of WBC celebrities other than myself and into the corner office of network vice president Carmen Sandoval.
She’d been seated behind an ultra-contemporary desk—a J-shaped sheet of smoked glass resting atop three rosewood blocks. She stood quickly, sending her black leather chair rolling back across the gray tiled floor. She was nearly six feet in her Jimmy Choo python-print espadrilles, shiny black slacks, and scoop-neck, long-sleeve blouse that picked up the same pattern as her shoes. She was almost too thin, but there was nothing weak or fragile about her. Her overlarge black-framed designer glasses were fashionable, highlighting periwinkle-blue eyes while also drawing your attention to a nose that had been cosmetically altered.
Like Whisper, she was pale. I’d heard that was a badge of honor on this sunny coast, where a tan was the mark of the frivolous or the unemployed. But because of her jet-black, close-cropped hair, her skin seemed almost bloodless, a notion enhanced by lipstick so dark it was almost black. Somebody should have told her that the vampire look was hard to carry off once you passed the forty mark.
She glanced at a steel-and-gold Breitling watch that looked as big as a sundial on her thin wrist and curled down the corners of her dark red lips in a gesture of distaste. “Chef Blessing,” she said, “I’m surprised that someone with your on-camera experience would treat time so cavalierly.”
“Sorry I’m late,” I said, “but I had to stop off for a piss. You know how that is.”
Behind me, Whisper was having trouble subduing a gurgle.
Surprisingly, Carmen Sandoval seemed genuinely amused. “Considering the extent of your tardiness, I hope you took time to wash your hands.” She thrust out a thin and chalky claw in a gesture of friendship that I accepted, even though her fingernails looked like they’d been tipped in blood. “Welcome to WBC West, Billy,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind the first-name informality.”
“I prefer it.”
“I was surprised to hear from Gretchen that this is your first visit to the studio.”
“The last time I was on this coast, I wasn’t working for WBC.”
“Well, Vida can serve as your guide,” she said, gesturing to the other side of the office, where a very attractive young sister sat on a plum-colored armchair, smiling at me. Even though Carmen was an undeniably commanding presence, I couldn’t believe I’d failed to notice Vida Evans.
“Hi, Billy,” she said. “Been a while.” She moved into my arms for a very unbusinesslike hug.
“I gather you two have met,” Carmen said.
We had. Several years before in Manhattan. We’d been seated at the same table at a blowout celebrating the sixty-fifth birthday of Worldwide’s CEO, Commander Vernon Di Voss. Vida, then part of the team of reporters covering the White House, had flown in from D.C. with her husband, Congressman Harrison Oakley.
At the time I’d pegged him as a pompous, “I rose above my ghetto background to become a Princeton graduate” jerk who couldn’t hold his liquor. He took offense at my making polite conversation with his wife, whom he was ignoring in favor of a sitcom starlet with a chest size higher than her IQ. As it turned out, good old Harrison was also a greedhead who, shortly thereafter, got caught in the blowback from the Jack Abramoff scandal. For his crimes, including lying to a grand jury, he went off for a year and a day to the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland.
His conviction turned out to be a good thing for Vida, at least professionally (and I hoped personally). She divorced the bastard and, since his criminal behavior had seriously compromised her effectiveness as a capital reporter, she’d leapt at the offer of an early-morning newswriter and -reader spot at the network’s owned-and-operated affiliate in Los Angeles.
In relatively few years, she’d made an astonishing series of career leaps until, finally, thanks to an Emmy nomination for her documentary Crack in the Wall of Sound: The Phil Spector Story, she’d settled in as a regular contributor to Hotline, the net’s prime-time newsmagazine.
“Actually, we met only once,” I told Carmen. “But the effect was profound.”
I stepped back a few paces to observe Vida. “You were merely beautiful then. Now … wow!”
“Is it any wonder I jumped at the chance to spend a few days with this lovely man?” she asked Carmen.
> “Whatever spins your Frisbee,” Carmen said as she shoved papers into a briefcase the size of a garment bag. “It’s past time I hit the road. Thanks to Billy’s tiny bladder, I’ll be spending the next hour or more creeping through going-home traffic all the way to Costa Mesa.”
“You live in Costa Mesa?” I asked.
“Why would anyone live in Costa Mesa?” she replied, clicking the case shut. “I’m going there to see a revival of Equus at South Coast Rep. We’re about to put the young male lead under contract and, thanks to the full-frontal scene, I’ll never get a better chance to judge his talent.”
She picked up the case and, apparently deciding it was too heavy for her, handed it to Whisper, who nearly threw her back out accepting it. The four of us took a crowded elevator down to the main floor. “Anything else you need, Billy,” Carmen said, “don’t hesitate to ask … Vida.”
We watched her marching off past other exiting staffers, Whisper at her heels, struggling with the briefcase.
“Well, that was bracing,” I said.
“Carmen is definitely one of a kind,” she said. “I like working with her. This is Passive-Aggressive City. Passive to your face, doubly aggressive behind your back. Carmen gives it to you straight.”
“So you’re my guide, huh? Things that slow at Hotline?”
“Hardly,” she said. “And this won’t be all fun and games. Your producer in New York sent a laundry list of ‘wants.’ ”
“Why don’t we discuss them over dinner?” I suggested.
“I’d love to, Billy, but I, ah … have another commitment.” She dug a card out of her handbag. “Call me tomorrow, any time after nine, and we’ll set something up.”
She moved forward, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “See you when I see you.”
Who says romance is dead?
Chapter
ELEVEN
Carmen was right about the going-home traffic. It was even worse than it was on the drive in, the stop-and-go extending all the way to Malibu. It was after seven when my guidance system led me to a supermarket near the Sands, another forty-five minutes before I turned onto Malibu Sands Drive.
