The Trouble Boy, page 24
On Monday morning, I called in sick and then went to the police station. The waiting room at the Tenth Precinct was crowded. I wondered if I should have consulted a lawyer first. I still had the number Jamie had given me, scribbled on a piece of paper in my wallet.
A large female cop announced my name and I was led to Detective Shiro’s office. He was sitting at his desk and looked like he was wearing the same rumpled clothes from the last time I had seen him.
“I’m glad you decided to stop by. Can I get you some coffee?”
I passed on the offer, since I was jittery already.
“So you got some new information for us?” He pulled out his notebook.
After taking a deep breath, I told him I knew Jordan was drunk and high and I recounted what I could of the conversation in the car. I told him Ariana had asked me to lie about what happened.
He listened intently, and took copious notes.
When I finished, he asked me if I would be willing to tell everything in sworn testimony.
“Yes,” I said. “But I have a question—I know you’re going to think I’m an idiot—but do I need a lawyer for this? I mean, I know I didn’t do anything wrong, but—”
He chuckled. “Yes, you should have a lawyer. You should have had one from the beginning. Nobody told you that? Your friend Miss Richards seems to have had her lawyer on this case before they were done loading the bodies. Your other buddies have them, too.”
“They’re not my buddies,” I said. “I work for one of them, and the other two, I mean, I’m not even their friend. But they’re all rich. They can afford lawyers.”
“I think you can well afford a lawyer.”
“Why? What do you know about me?”
“More than you’d think,” he said.
When I left the station, I was so relieved he hadn’t asked me if I was on drugs that I almost forgot what I had just done.
I phoned my mother in San Francisco. She would know what to do.
“Call your friend’s lawyer,” she said.
“What about the cost?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll pay.”
My fears were momentarily assuaged. It would be good to have someone on my side who knew what he was doing.
I was able to get a last-minute appointment at 5 P.M. that day with Clifford Bronstein. His office was in an anonymous building on Park Avenue South that housed lawyers, accountants, and insurance agents.
Clearly, Clifford Bronstein had done well for himself. He looked tan and healthy; his office was all plate glass and chrome. When he shook my hand, I noticed his manicure.
Jamie had told me that Bronstein was one of Manhattan’s savviest criminal attorneys. I hated that word, criminal.
“Your friend Jamie told me about the case and mentioned you might be calling,” he said. “His father and I play tennis together.”
I wanted to get right to the point. I told him my side of the story, including the part about the coke.
When I had finished, he examined me closely for a moment.
“Did the police ask you about whether you were under the influence of drugs?” he finally said.
“No, and I didn’t mention it to them. I said I’d had a few drinks.”
“You know this actress—Miss Gardner—her lawyer will ask you that. He’ll claim it could contaminate your testimony.”
“I understand,” I said. “But can I be charged for it?”
He leaned back in his leather chair. “We’ll get you immunity for your testimony. This head injury you had—Jamie mentioned it—that may play into this. But you’ll have to come clean about everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for example, how much were you carrying for Miss Gardner?”
“I don’t know. Less than a gram. I wasn’t carrying it. Ariana just asked me to flush it down the toilet.”
“You can’t be charged for it, since there’s no actual evidence. You can really only be charged for possession, and it sounds like the drugs weren’t technically yours. Now, you’re sure it was only cocaine, right? It wasn’t crack?”
“God, no.” What kind of person did he think I was?
“The penalties for crack are much higher.”
“You won’t have to worry about that,” I said.
“And you’ve never sold coke or carried it for someone else?”
“Carried it?”
“Carried it across borders, transported large amounts?”
“No, of course not.”
There was a pause between us.
“Everyone will know,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “everyone will know. In terms of this case, I wouldn’t worry about it. The jury will be much more focused on whether Miss Gardner was doing drugs. Since she’s a celebrity, they’re going to let her hang. Besides, the other two—Ariana and Cameron, is it?—they will certainly face charges for witness tampering. That’s a much more serious offense.”
A line kept running through my head: Actions have consequences . I hated it when people like Cameron were right.
“What about my job?” I asked. “If my boss finds out about this, he’ll fire me.”
“He can’t fire you,” he said. “The only thing you can do to get out of that job is quit.”
When I left the apartment the next morning, there were five photographers, three television crews, and four reporters camped out on my front steps.
I froze and they snapped. After about five seconds, I realized I had to keep moving.
They kept bombarding me with questions.
“On the advice of my lawyer, I can’t comment on the case,” I said to all of them. Saying I had retained a lawyer seemed like an admission of guilt.
I considered the consequences of giving testimony, something I had tried to avoid thinking about in the last twenty-four hours. Jordan could go to jail. Ariana and Cameron would face criminal charges. Everything I had built up over the past eight months would go to hell. I would have to start over.
But this is the right thing, I kept telling myself. You’re doing the right thing.
I wasn’t looking forward to going to work that morning, though I knew Cameron couldn’t fire me, at least not without the prospect of a huge lawsuit. As much as I dreaded being around him, I knew that I could take as much time as I wanted to find a new job.
On my way to the office, I saw the Post had run a banner headline across the top of the front page: “Backseat Witness Tells All.” The picture that ran was from the night Jamie, Donovan, and I were at Flash with Jordan. The small photo next to the banner was a close-up of Jordan and me; inside the paper was the full photo, including Jamie and Donovan. I cringed when I saw their smiling faces.
The story on page three was largely regurgitated information from the past week. The press had no idea what I had told; they only knew I had told something.
The headline alone was enough for Cameron.
“You’ve got some explaining to do!” he screamed at me. “This is what you do on your day off? Didn’t I tell you not to talk to the police or reporters?”
I said nothing.
“What did you say to them?” he asked.
“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “My lawyer said I shouldn’t say anything.”
“You can forget about writing the Lola screenplay,” he said. “Someone with your lack of experience never should have been working on that project anyway.”
“Whatever, Cameron,” I said, turning back to my computer as if he didn’t exist.
“You know, Toby, sometimes you drive me fucking crazy.” He turned around, went into his office, and shut the door.
I could tell he had no idea what to do. He knew he couldn’t fire me, and yelling at me wasn’t going to do any good, either. As much as I hated being in the same office as Cameron, I wanted to leave on my own terms. Quitting at this stage would be admitting defeat.
Later that morning, I started browsing the online job listings. I restricted my search to film and media, but found only listings for assistants in finance, human resources, business development—none of the things I wanted to do.
Jamie called me as soon as he read the news.
“I’ll explain everything,” I said. “Dinner tonight?”
I met Donovan and him at a dim sum place in Chinatown. They were already sitting down when I arrived.
Jamie didn’t waste any time in quizzing me about what was going on.
I told them the entire story.
Jamie leaned forward when I finished. “Look, we’re glad you told the truth about what happened, but why did you lie to us?”
“There’s no way you can understand the pressure I was under,” I said, squirming in my seat. “Ariana has so many contacts; she controls everything. And now that I’m on Cameron’s shit list, I may never live to see one of my screenplays produced.”
“I know how it is,” Donovan said. “Sometimes the time just isn’t right to tell the truth about things.”
“I can’t believe you went to all that trouble to protect those bastards,” Jamie said, shaking his head.
“They were all I had.”
“Hey!” Jamie said. “You have us.”
I knew he was staring at me, but I couldn’t meet his gaze.
Cameron was an expert at the art of subtle war. My workload tripled from what it had been before the accident. Tasks Cameron had been handling himself for the past week were foisted on me, and everything needed to be done immediately, today. Once again, I had to take care of Cameron’s personal needs, from fetching his lunch and making his protein shakes to picking up his dry cleaning and returning his DVDs. Every half hour I thought to myself, I have to quit, I have to quit. But quitting would be giving up, letting Cameron be the bully. I needed the paycheck, and I needed to stay in the business, at least until I found something else. If I quit, he would win.
The day after Cameron’s blow-up, I stocked up on protein powder for him, enough to last several months. That evening, though, I replaced his containers of Metabolic Support Formula with the Super Weight Gain Formula that Jamie used, keeping the lower-calorie powder for myself. With each shake, Cameron would now be getting twice as many calories and four times as many grams of carbohydrates. It was sure to wreak havoc on his waistline.
Reporters kept hounding me over the phone, but I gave no interviews, so all the articles resorted to speculation. The photographers had stopped stalking me, so the press kept running file photos as there were new developments in the case.
On Wednesday, I slipped out for lunch and, armed with notebook and tape recorder, took the train uptown for my interview with Miles Bradshaw. I knew Cameron would be upset if I was gone for long, but it wasn’t every day I was offered an interview I could sell anywhere in town. There was a chance Ariana had cancelled the appointment, but there was an equal chance she had forgotten. Once I had conducted the interview, it wouldn’t matter whether or not it was sanctioned by the director’s publicist. It would be mine.
Bradshaw lived in a beautiful pre-war co-op on Central Park West. After I was let up by his doorman, his assistant greeted me and took me to his study. The director was in his late forties, though even with his beard, he looked younger. Talking with him was like hanging out during office hours with a friendly college professor. I was surprised Ariana had a client who was so down to earth.
The interview was going swimmingly, and Bradshaw seemed charmed by my youth and extensive knowledge of his films. Halfway through, his assistant came in and whispered something to him.
He turned to me. “Apparently, my publicist wants this interview to be cut short. Does this have anything to do with that accident a few weeks ago?”
“It has everything to do with it,” I said.
He turned to his assistant. “You tell Ariana I’ll give whatever interviews I damn well please.”
I grinned as his assistant scurried back to her office. The guy had balls.
“Never let anyone tell you how to do things if you think you know better,” he growled. “That’s the only way you can ever get anything done in this lifetime that’s of real worth.”
The following day, I was getting back to my desk with a stack of freshly copied scripts when I ran into Margaret.
“Toby, can you pick up lunch for us? I’ll have a tuna on seven-grain and Cameron will have the creamed spinach. And two iced teas.”
“Creamed spinach?” I asked. “He never orders that. He must have meant steamed spinach.”
“I thought I heard him say ‘creamed,’ ” she said, “but you would know better.”
Surely Margaret had misunderstood him; he would never order something so fattening. I picked up the food for the two of them, opting for steamed spinach for Cameron.
I left the food in his office and went to make the rest of the copies. Just as I was returning with a second stack of scripts to bind, I heard Cameron yelling.
“What the fuck is this?” He was standing in the doorway of his office. “I ask you for creamed spinach and you bring me this shit?”
He lobbed the open take-out container at my desk, splattering my keyboard with wet strands of spinach. Margaret and several other staff members stared in horror at the mess Cameron had created.
I knew he was trying to get me to quit, so I decided to piss him off even more.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “I’ll go get that creamed spinach for you. But Cameron, food fights in the office?”
The rest of the office snickered at Cameron as he stood in the doorway like a guilty child.
Just as I was about to leave the office that evening, my phone rang. I answered it, trying not to sound too dejected.
“Toby? Sherry,” Sherry Merrill said, with a familiarity that would indicate we spoke every day.
“I just got off the phone with my contact at a studio I sent Breeders to. They were extremely excited about it. They think it has real potential, real punch. When I mentioned how old you were, they were rolling on the floor.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“That’s a great thing! They were thrilled someone so young had written such a clever comedy.”
“Comedy?”
“I was going to mention that to you. They’re seeing it not as a serious film but as more satirical, more camp. Sort of like a gay Barbarella.”
A gay Barbarella? I had tried to write a serious societal commentary, and I had ended up with a drag queen in a zero-gravity striptease.
It had been so long since I’d sent it out, I couldn’t even remember if Breeders had the potential to be campy. I decided it didn’t matter. If Breeders was going to be my introduction to the business, then so be it. I’d have more serious stories to tell in the future.
“There’s something else,” Sherry continued. “In addition to taking out an option on Breeders, they’re interested in considering you for another project.” I heard her shuffling through her notes. “When I told them about your history, they said they had been looking for something on young gay life set in New York. Do you have anything like that?”
Only the last eight months of my life. “I have something I’ve started on,” I said.
“Good. Start getting a pitch prepared. But Toby—”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve got to remember something. This business is always changing, and they could feel differently about your work next week. So don’t get your hopes up before anything’s certain.”
“I understand.” I took a deep breath. “So where do we go from here?”
“Let me follow up on it in a few days. They need to show your work to some more people, come to some sort of decision. I’ll keep you posted.”
Finally, I thought. The studio was like a handsome guy who walks into a party just at that moment when you think all hope is lost. It was one more chance.
That evening, Donovan and I went out to dinner, just the two of us, at a new tapas place in the West Village.
When I arrived, he was sitting in a dark corner. He poured me a glass of sangria and I lit a cigarette.
He looked extremely tan.
“Did you go away for the weekend?” I asked. “You got some sun.”
“Nope,” he said. “Tanning booth.”
That figures, I thought.
I was starving and anxious to place our order.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “I feel awful it’s taken so long to get this out.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “You tested positive.”
“No, it’s not that!” he said. “I’m negative.”
“Then what?”
“You know how Elizabeth and I slept together?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, she lied about being on the pill.”
“And?”
“She’s pregnant.”
Just at that moment, the waiter came to take our order. I had lost my appetite, so I waved him away.
I turned to Donovan, stunned. “Is she going to have the baby?” I finally asked.
He sat back in his chair and sighed. “She wants to have it. I wasn’t crazy about the idea at first, but I’ve sort of warmed up to it. I mean, it’s not how I imagined my life would turn out, but I feel it’s a responsibility I have to accept.”
“Are you sure you’re the father?” I asked. “You know, I wouldn’t trust her about that. She was with that guy Chad for a while.”
I lit another cigarette and poured myself more sangria.
“We’re sure,” he said. “We had a paternity test done.”
“When did you find out about this?”
“She told me about a month ago. She had papers drawn up that say I won’t be financially responsible for the child.”
