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  “What was the story conference about?”

  “What they’d been about for the last twenty weeks—the fact that we didn’t have a story line.” He looked at me for a second. “Do you know anything at all about this business?”

  “Not really,” I admitted.

  “Then maybe I’d better explain a few things to you—some fundamentals—so that you can get the picture. O.K.?”

  “Fine.”

  Mack leaned back on the couch. “The head writer on a soap, Quentin, in this case, writes the long-term document—a ninety- or a hundred-page plot outline that provides three to six months worth of story material for the subwriters. Without a document, the whole process is screwed. The breakdown writers, a group that used to include me up until today at about 12:15, expand on the longterm, by turning it into daily narratives, in which the plot is fleshed out and the dialogue is indicated. We don’t actually write the dialogue; that’s the job of the scriptwriters, who turn the breakdowns into scripts—pure dialogue in dramatic form. Usually one of the breakdown people acts as chief breakdown man. That was my job before today. The chief breakdown man has a little more say about story, but the head writer has the overall responsibility, or he’s supposed to have, for writing the document, seeing that the breakdowns are done, editing the scripts, and delivering all the materials in a satisfactory form to the producers. When things are run well, by an experienced hand, it’s a remarkably efficient way of doing things. It actually works. I’ve seen it work. I got my training under one of the best writers in daytime, so I know what I’m talking about. When things aren’t run well, as in the case of our boy, Quentin, it’s like slow death. Without a document, we have to make the story up from day to day, vamp for weeks on end. It’s not a healthy situation.”

  Mack hardly looked old enough to have had much experience, yet he talked as if he’d been in the business for years.

  “How did you get involved in ‘Phoenix’?” I asked him.

  “I started working on ‘Restless Years’ as a scriptwriter under Russ Leonard. Russ was a close friend of mine. When he was made head writer on ‘Phoenix’ in ‘79, he took me along with him as his chief breakdown man.”

  “Dover wasn’t the original head writer on ‘Phoenix’?” I said.

  Mack laughed snidely. “They didn’t tell you about that, did they, Harry?”

  “No, they didn’t,” I said uncomfortably. “Was Helen the producer in ‘79?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She’s always been the producer. Jack wasn’t made exec until right before Quentin took over in ‘80.”

  “Why did Quentin take over?”

  “Oh, that’s the good part,” Mack said. “You know, Quentin Dover wasn’t the first death on ‘Phoenix.’ No, sir. But they didn’t tell you about that either, did they? They just told you that Walt was spreading scurrilous gossip about poor dead Quentin. Only Walt seldom talks to anyone higher up than Helen. So you tell me, Harry, how did big bad Frank Glendora hear all those awful stories?” He laughed again and jingled the ice in his glass. “I need another one of these. How ‘bout you?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Sure, you’re fine, Harry,” he said as he got up from the couch. “You’re a real he-man.”

  He walked out of the room and came back with a full glass and a bottle. He dropped the fifth on the Parsons table and raised his glass in a toast.

  “Cheers.” Walt swallowed all of the whiskey. “Got to get primed for this one,” he said, pouring another shot. “Always get primed for my Russ Leonard story. Where was I, anyway?”

  “You said there was another death.”

  “Oh, yeah. It was Russ. He died.”

  “How?”

  “Well, it wasn’t in the bathroom. He had a little sense of style, Russ did. How did he die? Let me see. He died of loss of blood—I believe that was the coroner’s verdict.”

  “Like Quentin?”

  “Nooo,” Mack said. “Not like Quentin, because of Quentin. Quentin and Helen.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Mack took another swallow of booze and set the glass down hard on the tabletop. “I mean someone started up some nasty rumors about Russ. Isn’t that a coincidence! A year into the show, and they started talking him down. Helen didn’t like his long-terms. She said they didn’t measure up. Enter Quentin Dover—Helen’s ‘story consultant.’ Dear Quentin. Dear, sweet Quentin. He stepped on the scene like something out of Henry James—one of those charming, worldly-wise, rotten little bastards without a heart for anything but himself. He stepped in all paternal kindness and good manners. He was going to help straighten everything out, then go on his merry way, leaving a happy world behind him. It was like a visitation from a god. What bullshit! You know, I learned one thing from the bastard. I learned that you can get whatever you want if you just ask for it in the right way. There was a three-month transition period, while the rumors percolated and Quentin lorded it up. Russ held his breath and made nice-nice to Quentin and tried not to hear the names they were calling him behind his back. Then Helen put her foot down—right on Russ’s neck.”

  “She fired him?”

  “You got the picture, Har’,” Mack said. “Smart as a whip. She not only fired him; she ruined him. She and Quentin buried him so deep in shit that nobody would ever touch him again.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve got to pile it on deep, Harry, when you’re trying to cover something up. Hell, the show wasn’t doing well enough. We had a seventeen share. Never mind that we were slotted against one of the top-rated shows on daytime or that we’d only had a year to get established. Those share points, Harry, they mean money. And money is life. I really believe that. Helen wasn’t about to take it in the pants. But somebody had to. Who did that leave?”

  “What happened to Leonard after she fired him?”

  Mack sat back on the couch and tossed the rest of the bourbon down. His face got red and he blew noisily out his mouth. “Whew! I’m getting crocked. Sure I can’t pour you another one?”

  I shook my head.

  “What happened,” he said, sweeping the bottle off the table and tipping it with a click into the glass, “is that Russ went home and put on a record. Then he sat down on the floor and began to cry. You know how I know that? Because I got there before the tears had dried—right after Helen passed me the word about firing him.”

  Mack hugged the bottle to his chest and swallowed what he’d poured into the glass. “I called the life squad, of course. But it was too late. I knew it when I saw him, curled up on the floor. And you know what’s funny? Helen cried her eyes out at the funeral—cried like a baby. Blamed herself for everything. Helen’s a big spender when it comes to after-market guilt.”

  “How about Quentin?” I asked.

  “The putz didn’t even realize what he’d done,” Walt said with enormous rage. He’d started to cry himself, but just tears—as if someone had passed an onion under his eyes. “When he found out that he’d inherited Russ’s job, he was surprised. I mean really surprised! Alarmed is probably the right word. He’d just been bullshitting all along. But Helen and Russ—they’d taken his act seriously. All that visiting god crap. Russ actually thought Quentin was there to help. And Helen was banking on it. It gave her the courage to knife Russ. But Quentin...Quentin was just putting up a front. Doing what he did best—acting charming and competent and never dreaming for a moment that someone might put him to the test. That kind of self-delusion is criminal.”

  Downstairs, I heard the door open and someone called out, “Walt?”

  “Up here, Dave,” Walt said.

  A lanky kid in a T-shirt and jeans walked into the room. He took a look at Walt’s face and said, “Jesus, what happened?”

  “Congratulate me, babe,” Walt said. “I’ve just been made head writer on ‘Phoenix.’”

  16

  DAVE STOOD in the doorway, staring at Walt Mack. He was a handsome kid in his mid-twenties—hair cut short l
ike Mack’s, with the same bland, boyish, unexceptional face. “Perhaps you can explain what’s going on,” he said to me.

  Mack had sunk into silence, his hands folded around the bottle at his chest. I glanced at him and said, “Maybe Walt should tell you.”

  “We were just having a talk, Dave,” Mack said. “About Russ.”

  Dave raised an eyebrow. “Oh,” he said. “I thought you weren’t going to think about that anymore.”

  Mack shrugged. “Sometimes you can’t help yourself.” He looked at me. “Is there anything else you want to know, Harry?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Why didn’t you quit after Leonard’s death?”

  “You mean, if I cared so much, why didn’t I tell them how I really felt?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  Mack laughed, although I didn’t see much of a joke. “That’s not the way it works out here, Harry. Moral outrage doesn’t put the bread on the table.”

  Or the Porsche in front of the beach house, I said to myself.

  “I like my life,” Walt said. “And why should I have committed suicide, too, just to make a point? Besides, there are other ways of getting revenge.”

  “Like talking down your head writer?”

  Mack glared at me. “I already told you that I didn’t spread any gossip that wasn’t already being spread by your friends. I even tried to help the bastard out. Somebody had to look after things with Quentin in control or the show would have died months ago. He didn’t really know anything about the business. He was worse than an amateur. He didn’t even have an amateur’s curiosity. All of his credits had been in prime time and soaps were a new world to him. He tried to fake his way through it for the first few months, but the other writers knew what was going on. And when he realized that we’d seen through him, he acted like a kid who’d been caught in a lie. I guess he thought that was charming—that we’d all feel sorry enough for him to help out. Who knows? Maybe we did. I doctored his long-terms for twelve months and did most of the weekly blocking, and he patted me on the back in that fulsome, paternal way of his. But that was all I ever got out of him—a pat on the back. He was shrewd enough to take all the credit for himself when things were going well.”

  “If he wasn’t doing the work, how could he get away with that?” I asked.

  Mack laughed again. “You really don’t understand this business, do you? Helen had a lot invested in Quentin. Christ, she’d just driven a man to suicide because she thought Dover was worth the risk. You can’t change head writers every other month, Harry. It makes you look bad, makes people like Glendora think that you don’t know what you’re doing. And Helen had a tough enough time getting the job of producer in the first place. Once she made the decision about Russ, she had to live with Quentin. And then, in spite of his incompetence, he never lost his ability to charm the right people. Regardless of what was coming out of his typewriter, he could make the folks at United believe that he knew exactly what he was doing. It was a gift he had—his only real talent. But even Helen had to reconsider things after Quentin had his heart attack. There was something there before March—the semblance of craft. Afterward there wasn’t even that much—just a twitch, a reflex. He might as well have been dead. He couldn’t do anything but smile and take his medicine. The ratings dropped. Helen began to get pressure from the brands and the network. And before you could say ‘Russ Leonard,’ the rumors started up again. Only this time they were true. Quentin was a borderline personality. He was taking a lot of drugs and booze. And he was incapable of telling the truth. Or of facing it.”

  “The document that you gave Helen today was your work, wasn’t it?”

  Mack drew himself up on the couch. “That’s almost an insult, Harry, old stick.”

  “Why did you write it?”

  “Somebody had to or the show would have folded. It still might fold.”

  I stared at him for a moment.

  “All right,” he said. “I wrote it to finish him. I wrote it because Helen was desperate and, if I produced, it would have meant the end of Dover’s career. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “Is it true?”

  Mack stared out the window. “Who knows?” he said.

  “Jack seems to think that Quentin had a hand in writing the document.”

  “Jack’s full of shit,” Mack said. “Oh, Dover offered me money to help him out—a larger piece of the pie. But that was his only contribution.”

  “And you wanted it all,” I said.

  “I wanted what was owed me. And it wasn’t just money, Har’.”

  “Did Quentin know you were working on a story line?”

  Mack nodded. “I didn’t keep it a secret. I told him three weeks ago. And I told him what I was going to do with it, too.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He didn’t,” Mack said. “I told you—he was dead from the neck up. He just said, ‘Do what you have to do.’ And that was it. Later on, I found out that he’d gone to Helen after we’d spoken and told her that he and I were collaborating on a long-term and that it would be done by this Monday. Can you believe that? The man never lacked chutzpah, I’ll give him that much. Maybe he thought he could charm me into cooperating with him at the last moment.”

  “Could he have?”

  Mack snorted. “Not a chance.”

  I got up. “I’m going to have to get back to the hotel.”

  “Yeah, it was fun for me, too,” Walt said sulkily.

  “Take it easy, Walt,” I said. “You got your points across.”

  He stood up and put the bottle down on the Parsons table. “I’ll give you a ride back.”

  “You can’t drive,” Dave said. “You’re too loaded.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “No, you’re not.” Dave looked at me. “I’ll give you a lift. Where are you going?”

  “The Belle Vista.”

  “O.K.” He turned to Walt. “And you cheer up. We’ve got some celebrating to do when I get back.”

  “I almost forgot,” Mack said with a smile. “I just got what I’ve always wanted.”

  ******

  It was a quarter of five when we pulled into the Belle Vista lot. As I crawled out of the Porsche, Dave said, “You want to do Walt a favor?”

  “Not particularly,” I said.

  He smirked. “Then let me put it another way. Stay out of his life, schmuck. He has enough problems of his own without having to worry about Russ Leonard again. Or about fucking Quentin Dover.”

  He peeled out with a squeal of his tires, and I walked slowly up to the canopied bridge. Jerry, the parking lot attendant, saluted me; but I wasn’t in the mood for his brand of high jinks. I’d already heard about enough high jinks for one afternoon. I brushed past him without a word and headed straight for the lobby.

  “Be that way,” I heard him say.

  The woman at the reception desk gave me her practiced smile.

  “Miss Rose, again?”

  “I’d like to call her room,” I said.

  She plugged a line into a PBX and pointed to the booth in the corner. “You can take it over there.”

  I closed myself in the booth and picked up the receiver. Jack answered the phone. “Helen Rose’s room,” he said wearily.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Thank God. It’s a relief to hear a sane voice. How’d it go with Walt?”

  “I have to talk to you about that, Jack.”

  He must have heard the annoyance in my voice—I wasn’t trying to disguise it. When he answered me, he sounded miles away. “What happened?”

  “Well, among other things, I just found out about Russ Leonard.”

  “Walt mentioned him, did he?”

  “The question I want to ask is why didn’t you?”

  “Why should I have?” Jack said. “What does Russ have to do with Dover’s death?”

  “I don’t know if he has anything to do with it. It’s just that I keep hearing things bit by bit, J
ack. Like the fact that the show is in trouble, and that Mack delivered a long-term document that Quentin claimed he’d helped write, and that a man committed suicide after Dover took his job. It makes me wonder what else is in store: whether I’ve been hired to look into a possible scandal or to be guided around a few old ones.”

  “I resent that,” Moon said angrily. “I’m an executive producer, Harry, not a sleuth. I told you what I thought you needed to know. Frank Glendora had the same facts that I have. If he thought Russ Leonard’s death was important to the case, he would have told you.”

  “That’s another thing that worries me,” I said.

  “Look, can this wait an hour? We’ve got the network here and I’ve really got to go back to the meeting.”

  “Go back to the meeting, Jack,” I said.

  “We’ll get together at the Belle Vista bar at six,” he said. “And I’ll clear this thing up. I’ll even call Frank if it’ll make you feel better. I don’t know what Walt told you, but I’d be willing to bet that it’s not the whole truth. Or even most of it. He’s got an ax to grind, too, Harry. They all have.”

  17

  I SPENT an hour in the Belle Vista bar, drinking Scotch and waiting for Moon to finish with the network. At six-fifteen Jack showed up, looking as if he’d lost a friend. His face was haggard with fatigue, and he smelled through his coat of sweat and bone weariness.

  “We need to get a few things straightened out, Harry,” he said as he sat down beside me.

  “I guess we do.”

  “First of all, I talked to Glendora and he wants you to call him. Tonight, if possible. If not, then first thing tomorrow. He says he left a message at the hotel yesterday but that you didn’t choose to answer it.”

  I started to say something, but Jack waved an arm at me to shut up. “Let me finish,” he said. “Secondly, I want to assure you that I haven’t deliberately tried to mislead you. I don’t know why I have to say this. I thought we understood each other.”