by Maisie Dean
“Is there any way we can know for sure? Where did this video even come from, and why is it being released now?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. But Nate swears it wasn’t him,” he said.
“And what about all those resources we’re supposed to throw at it?” I said, taking in the empty office again.
Owen didn’t look perturbed. He puffed out his chest and typed away at the keyboard. “Luckily for this business establishment, and for Nate, I happen to be the right guy to analyze digital footage.”
“My hero,” I said.
Owen’s face reddened.
I took a seat on the edge of his desk and swung my foot back and forth.
Owen cleared his throat. “This may take a while. You don’t have to stay,” he said.
“I’m sad to say that I really don’t have anything better to do at the moment,” I replied. “Plus, you might need backup. I’d better stay.”
Owen smiled, his gaze rooted intently on the computer screen.
***
It took Owen, the computer whiz, under half an hour to determine that the footage in question was nearly a decade old.
“Why would it surface now?” I wondered aloud. Owen was used to my vocal musings by now. He tended to hear them all as rhetorical, which was only an issue when occasionally they weren’t.
“The bad news is, judging by the biometrics program I ran, this is, in fact, our Hollywood up and comer. Do you have any idea why he would lie?”
I widened my eyes and gestured to the screen. Nate’s language had been all kinds of offensive.
“I don’t mean deny it in front of the general public. I meant lie to us, the investigative team hired to help him with his career stalemate,” Owen clarified.
I shook my head. It didn’t seem like him at all, but I’d seen his brilliant acting in dozens of scenes over the course of the previous week. He was an actor, capable of creating all manner of believable stories.
I was still seated on the edge of Owen’s desk, swinging my feet around impatiently. “It doesn’t make any sense. Not the video, not the timing, not any of this. We need to get the truth from Nate. I’ll call him,” I told Owen.
At that moment Owen’s eyebrows lifted and he looked past me at the front door of the office. I had already pulled out my phone, but he leaned over and put his hand on top of the screen.
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said.
I heard the rattle of the doorbell and quickly spun around to face the newcomer.
“Nate!” I said. “What is going on?”
Nate’s face was flushed and blotchy. His breathing appeared to be rapid, and his hand kept returning to the side of his head to smooth down his hair.
“I was hoping that you would be able to tell me,” Nate said.
I could only describe his tone as desperate. For a moment, Nate’s gaze traveled around the room, taking in the haphazardly stacked boxes of legal files and dated desktop computers. His brows knit together even more deeply. It was his first time in the office, and he did not look impressed. I certainly wouldn’t either if I had become accustomed walking into the lobby at Zimmerman Talent.
Nate marched over to where Owen and I were still hunched over his laptop, his face tumbling into an even greater display of despair upon seeing the still image from the paused video.
“Play it again,” I told Owen.
Nate grabbed at his face with both hands. “Please, no. I’ve already seen it–”
“Play it, please,” I repeated to Owen and he struck the space bar.
“Nate, just see if anything jogs your memory,” I said gently.
It was right at the point where the man in the video—Nate, according to Owen’s biometrics—threw his script aside with a final flurry of curses and offensive slang, when Nate’s jaw dropped open.
“It is me,” he said, dazed. “I have put this out of my mind for so long that I didn’t even recognize it anymore.”
My heart sank. It was Nate, and it was all across the country by now. No matter how much I liked him or privately felt like a silent cheerleader for his new and unexpected family, I couldn’t see any way of protecting him now.
“You said those things?” I asked softly. In the back of my mind, I was praying that there was some kind of explanation.
“I did,” Nate said. “But it’s not what you think! I swear. My drama club tried to put on this play back in high school. It was meant to be provocative and illuminating. All that racist stuff is only part of the play.”
I was desperate to believe him. “Then why are you throwing down your script like that? It looks like you’re saying all those things outside of the narrative.”
“No! It was just meta. It was a play within a play. That was all part of it. Please believe me, it’s the truth. I never saw the footage before this morning,” Nate said.
“But you knew it existed before today?” Owen asked.
Nate nodded stoically. “We never performed the play. It got shut down for exactly this language. But a few years back, when I appeared in a few commercials, my drama teacher sold the footage back to me as a half-hearted blackmail attempt. He was a total chump, but I bought it anyway. What else was I supposed to do?” Nate asked rhetorically. “I didn’t watch it. I let my lawyer take care of the deal. It didn’t cost much to buy it back from Charlie. He was such an eccentric he probably asked for the exact amount to buy an old junker of a car to turn into an art installation.” Nate groaned and smacked his forehead with the base of his palm. “He had to have kept a copy,” Nate said.
Nate had answered one of the giant question marks hanging in my brain, but I still wondered why the clip would be released now. What had changed? And what good would it do anybody to permanently smear Nate’s career?
“Now we know there really is someone out there who wants to see your career suffer. It wasn’t all in your head, Nate,” I told him. Nate’s face showed the briefest glimmer of relief before it clouded back over with dread.
“But we’re still no closer to who or why,” he said.
“That’s not necessarily true,” I told him. “What did you say your drama teacher’s name was?”
Nate set his jaw firmly. “Charlie. Charlie Motus.”
CHAPTER 18
Owen, Nate, and I spent some time doing research on how far the video had made it and what the backlash was shaping up to be, all the while Nate’s phone rang off the hook. Eventually, he decided to face the music and head back to the agency to tackle more damage control and draft a statement. Luckily, it wasn’t until Nate had already gone that I came across an article suggesting the Screen Actors Guild, or SAG as we members of the industry called it, was considering stripping Nate of his card.
“We need to get a handle on this,” I said. “Nate can’t lose everything over this video. It’s completely inaccurate.” I crossed my arms tightly in front of me to take a break from discovering more and more bad news spread across the internet.
“And he’s got his family to think about,” Owen said under his breath. Owen was rarely the one to take note of the personal aspects of our cases. He mainly stuck to the numbers and other logistics, so it was touching to hear him consider Trudy and their potential son or daughter. Owen, the rational introvert, thought more about love and having a family than I’d expected.
“Have you found an address for the drama teacher yet?” I asked.
Owen was hunched over his keyboard, peering at a complex database that I didn’t recognize. “It’s strange. I’ve located a Charles Motus, Teacher at Georgian Preparatory Academy over the relevant years, but I can’t find anything on his activity or whereabouts over the past two years,” he said. Owen’s brows, which had been scrunched together like they had just collided in a high-speed crash, suddenly rebounded. They spread out and lifted as he made a ‘Hmm’ sound. He tapped away for another few seconds on a different database and then turned the laptop screen toward me triumphantly.
Owen said, “
It makes sense that no apartment building or tax collection agency has heard from him…”
“Because he’s dead,” I finished, taking in the report Owen had managed to dredge up.
Owen nodded. “Nothing nefarious. Colon cancer.”
“But that means Charlie didn’t have anything to do with releasing the video, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Owen repeated.
“Maybe he had a copy that got passed down to children or grandchildren with the rest of his things,” I suggested.
Owen leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Tracking down who might have had access to the footage is a big job. That’s plenty of billable hours, and we would need authorization from the client to switch gears into that type of investigation.
“It definitely goes beyond the current retainer,” I said.
“I’ll talk to Harrison to figure out our next move. Until I’ve got this figured out you might as well go enjoy your weekend, one of us should.”
“Are you sure? I don’t mind staying,” I said.
“It’s all good,” Owen said with a smile. “Harrison’s already going to bust us for making him pay us overtime for weekend work. Even saving him a few dollars may soften the blow.”
I rolled my eyes. “Got it. But call if you need me. Harrison will deal,” I said with a wink.
Owen’s cheeks immediately became rosy and he dropped eye contact. “I will,” he said.
CHAPTER 19
I did have plans that Saturday evening, as it turned out. Technically, they were Rosie’s plans. She had put me down as her plus one for a work associate’s backyard, shotgun wedding. The two of us spent far too long blowing out each other’s hair and sharing the bathroom mirror to fine-tune our makeup before we finally made it out of our apartment.
I had only been to a small number of weddings in my life, and I wasn’t sure what to expect from a so-called shotgun-style wedding. As soon as I stepped out of the car after Rosie and saw the white and blush-pink balloons at the side of the house, I could already tell it was the sweetest wedding I’d ever attended.
The timing of the marriage may have been out of necessity, but it was obvious upon arrival to the little decorated garden around the back of the house, that the bride and groom’s decision to wed was first and foremost out of love.
In the evening light, strings of lights strung back and forth overhead illuminated the party. There were even tiny tea lights on lotus flowers floating in the lap pool. Beautiful bouquets of sunset-pink peonies and greenery decorated a handful of different sized tables spread across the lawn. Flowers were hardly necessary, however, because the surrounding garden leaned itself beautifully to the decor with bushes of California poppies, pink puffs of Indian paintbrush, and the bright yellow and green tendrils of deerweed. I hadn’t attended many weddings, but it was always the flowers that made it the most enjoyable for me. Coincidentally, my dress matched the rosy, blush tone of the Indian paintbrush flowers, and Rosie’s matched the sunny yellow color of the deerweed blossoms. We made sure to snap a few photos together with our flower counterparts.
The bride, Erica, as I was introduced to her, was barefoot and wearing a simple yet incredibly elegant white dress. It had a matte white finish to the fabric, and thin straps that traveled evenly over her bronze shoulders. The dress was formfitting, right across her four-month-sized pregnant belly and all the way down to her toes, where more of the same fabric appeared and effortlessly spread out in a small fan shape behind her when she walked and danced.
“She’s so gorgeous,” Rosie said as we watched Erica place a small square of cake into her new husband’s waiting mouth. Dave, the groom, had dark curly hair and hip glasses. Despite my lack of experience on the subject, he looked absolutely smitten and entirely in love with his bride.
I wondered if Nate would marry Trudy. Why had they separated to begin with? Was it reconcilable?
“Kacey? Earth to Kacey, hello?” suddenly I heard Rosie saying over the Otis Redding song drifting throughout the garden.
“Sorry, what did you say?” I asked. The two of us were sitting at a round table near the pool, while several couples danced beneath the twinkling strings of lights. More people sat around the table with us, drinking, and eating canapés and cake.
“I’m going to get another glass of champagne. Refill?” Rosie asked.
I held my flute out to her. “Yes please, thank goodness we Ubered,” I replied. When Rosie had gone, my mind shot back to Nate’s predicament and the case like a rubber band. Nate seemed to me like the kind of guy who would balk at getting married without shoes on, but he did seem the romantic type. I could imagine him being a great dad, eventually popping the question to Trudy, and enjoying a new life with his new family. And those things could happen in whatever order suited the three of them the best. But with the video coming to light this way, I couldn’t help but feel my stomach tighten. There would be so many bumps in the road now for Nate and Trudy and Nate’s career. How would any of it work if Nate couldn’t get this whole mess cleared up once and for all?
I’d only been catching snippets of the conversation going on at my table, but suddenly my ears caught something familiar, a name or a word, and I tuned back in.
A man with a surfer’s mop of sun-drenched blonde hair and a powder-blue dress shirt was talking about something in the news.
“That racist actor, did you hear about him?” the man was asking a middle-aged woman who was wearing about ten different necklaces. “His agent just fired him, and rightly so in my opinion,” surfer guy said.
“Sorry, excuse me. Are you talking about Nate Pavel?” I asked.
“Yeah, you know that awful guy?”
“No,” I said, and quickly pulled out my phone. It was the truth, in a way. I didn’t know that awful guy. I knew a cheeky, kind-hearted, talented man who was getting his name dragged through the mud.
A quick phone search later and I had found it. Iris Zimmerman had released a statement severing her professional relationship with Nate, citing that she was shocked and personally offended by his views.
Where was Rosie? Suddenly, I was acutely aware of how much I needed that champagne.
***
On the ride home, all the champagne and frosting I had consumed swirled around miserably inside my stomach. The mix was an unfortunate companion to the growing knot of anxiety already firmly planted in there. Zimmerman Talent’s public vote of non-confidence regarding Nate was the worst thing that could have happened. The media backlash would only exacerbate the lies and misunderstanding further, and the harm it would do to Nate’s public image could be irrevocable. After this, there might not even be another agent in town who’d want to touch him.
“What a disaster,” Rosie said. “Poor Nate.”
At this point, I hadn’t even bothered trying to keep my voice low to prevent the details being heard by our Uber driver or anyone else at the wedding who heard me catching Rosie up on the nasty developments of the day. If they decided to talk to the press, at least it would be more accurate than the misconceptions the trashy magazines and talk shows were eagerly dishing out.
After listening to it all, Rosie put her hand on top of mine and made her voice more gentle and sweet. “I’m sorry all this is happening. I guess that means your chances with the agency are gone too, right?” she asked.
I sat back heavily against the leather seat of the unfamiliar car. Rosie was correct. I hadn’t even thought about that yet. Nate was my ticket to even the slimmest of chances at being represented by Iris Zimmerman, and he’d been cut off faster than you could say publicity nightmare.
All evening I’d been weighed down by frustration and anxiety on Nate’s behalf, but now I selfishly felt even worse. The remnants of my own acting career had quietly gone up in flames alongside Nate’s. The rest of the ride home Rosie and I racked our brains for any halfway-decent idea that might begin to put out the flames, but anything we came up with would be as helpful as throwing water into an oil fire.
CHAPTER 20
The next morning, I woke up groggy and disoriented. The murkiness inside my head made it difficult to separate the realities of what happened the night before from the crazy dreams. Head throbbing, I rolled over to see that my angel of a roommate had left a full glass of water and two Aspirin pills on my nightstand. Beside them, my phone screen lit up again and again.
I kept one eye firmly shut and the other open just a crack as I swiped to unlock the phone. The notifications were all related to the ongoing coverage of Nate’s scandal. Since Friday, he had been hounded by paparazzi and smeared across every tabloid under the sun. It said something dark about media and society in this country, when a guy like Nate could work his butt off, honestly and with integrity, to refine his talent and move up in the industry world, but the thing that got him onto the front pages and in the news centered around an ugly lie. The problem was, almost nobody knew that the video clip’s context had been distorted and used to take Nate down. It had to have been leaked for a specific reason... but why and by whom?
From the comfort of my bed, beneath a mound of blankets, I scoured the internet for all the material I could find on Nate. A few hopeful sites reported the truth about the clip being a misused segment of a meta play, the goal of which had been to take on racism, not propagate it. But those kinds of articles and comments were few and far between, and the outraged people were much louder.
Based on what I read, the “Phantom Hunters” pilot had not been canceled. Yet. But fans of Nate’s and Thomas’s earlier work had taken to Twitter in hordes to shame the production company for hiring Nate. The general consensus was a call for Nate to be replaced or the show canceled. Even Diablo City took down their repost from when Thomas tagged them in his social media. The food truck company had even issued an apology post to their loyal followers saying that they were sorry for their connection and endorsement to the show and would no longer be associated in any way.
